Description
Book SynopsisSatoru Hashimoto offers a novel way of understanding the origins of modern literature in a transregional context, drawing on Chinese-, Japanese-, and Korean-language texts in both classical and vernacular forms.
Trade ReviewAfterlives of Letters dismantles modern literature's self-mythologization as a break with the past by showing that East Asian authors created modern literature through conscious engagement with the literary heritage of classical Chinese. -- Christopher L. Hill, author of
Figures of The World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational FormIn
this impressively multilingual and theoretically sophisticated analysis, Hashimoto reexamines claims that modern East Asian literature was either a radical departure from preceding classical traditions or was directly grounded on those same national traditions. Instead, Hashimoto contends that this literature was haunted by its classical legacies while also being thoroughly transnational in its contemporary incarnations. -- Carlos Rojas, author of
Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation in Modern ChinaExpansive in scope and meticulous in detail,
Afterlives of Letters revises the established view that modern literature emerged in East Asia as a thorough break with the region’s shared cultural past. It liberates the founding fathers of “national literatures” in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan from their imposed canonicity, and enlivens transregional and transtemporal aspects of their writerly practices. -- Youngju Ryu, author of
Writers of the Winter Republic: Literature and Resistance in Park Chung Hee’s KoreaBy reuse, repetition, and parody, the authors in Satoru Hashimoto’s wide-ranging, meticulous, and original study made Asian modernity out of the ruins of their classical culture, as they dared to imagine freedom from old-style and new-style empires. Literary history in its complexity here illuminates the needs of the present. -- Haun Saussy, author of
The Making of Barbarians: Chinese Literature and Multilingual AsiaPutting Chinese, Japanese, and Korean authors in transnational dialogue, Satoru Hashimoto brilliantly delineates how East Asian writers grappled with Western modernity while forging their own modernity from local traditions. -- Ban Wang, author of
At Home in Nature: Technology, Labor, and Critical EcologyTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Conventions
Introduction
Part I: A Multilayered Contact Space in Turn-of-the-Century East Asia1. Literature’s Search for Itself: Liang Qichao and Meiji Political Fiction
2. Literature and Life in Exile: Sin Ch’aeho’s Engagement with Liang Qichao’s Work
Part II: Reforming Language and Redefining “Literature”3. Parody and Repetition: Rereading the Works of Lu Xun, Mori Ōgai, and Yi Kwangsu
4. History as Rewriting: The Historical Fiction of Lu Xun, Mori Ōgai, and Yi Kwangsu
Part III: Japan’s Imperial Mimicry and Its Critique5. Archaeology of Resistance: Zhou Zuoren’s Cultural Criticism in Wartime East Asia
6. Transnational Allegory: Intertextualizing Lu Xun in Late Colonial Korean, Taiwanese, and Manchukuo Literatures
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
