Books by "John Reddie Black"
3 books found
The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature
by John Whittier Treat
2018 · University of Chicago Press
The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature tells the story of Japanese literature from its start in the 1870s against the backdrop of a rapidly coalescing modern nation to the present. John Whittier Treat takes up both canonical and forgotten works, the non-literary as well as the literary, and pays special attention to the Japanese state's hand in shaping literature throughout the country's nineteenth-century industrialization, a half-century of empire and war, its post-1945 reconstruction, and the challenges of the twenty-first century to modern nationhood. Beginning with journalistic accounts of female criminals in the aftermath of the Meiji civil war, Treat moves on to explore how woman novelist Higuchi Ichiyo's stories engaged with modern liberal economics, sex work, and marriage; credits Natsume Soseki's satire I Am a Cat with the triumph of print over orality in the early twentieth century; and links narcissism in the visual arts with that of the Japanese I-novel on the eve of the country's turn to militarism in the 1930s. From imperialism to Americanization and the new media of television and manga, from boogie-woogie music to Yoshimoto Banana and Murakami Haruki, Treat traces the stories Japanese audiences expected literature to tell and those they did not. The book concludes with a classic of Japanese science fiction a description of present-day crises writers face in a Japan hobbled by a changing economy and unprecedented natural and manmade catastrophes. The Rise and Fall of Japanese Literature reinterprets the "end of literature"—a phrase heard often in Japan—as a clarion call to understand how literary culture worldwide now teeters on a historic precipice, one at which Japan's writers may have arrived just a moment before the rest of us.
There were momentous events in Japan between 1853 and 1868. In just fifteen years, a repressive feudal regime was transformed into an embryonic democracy under the broadly benevolent eye of the young Emperor Meiji. Over 260 years of rigid rule by hereditary Tokugawa sh guns was swept aside, with trade as a mainspring of revolution. But the transition was punctuated with dissent and deceit, murder and mayhem. A young British businessman is murdered by samurai in 1862, and with the massive power of the Royal Navy, the British government demands reparations. The bombardment that ensues has far-reaching consequences, culminating in the defeat of the shogun's forces and the restoration of the Emperor to power. Why? How? Who? What happened - in detail? This book tells the whole astonishing sequence of events, with comprehensive notes on the history, culture, politics and mindset of the Japanese at that time, and discussion of British governmental and naval records and policies.