Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"This study charts an entirely new course in our thinking and writing about texts, authors, and locales. Miyazawa Kenji and his region are employed as focal points to incorporate an enormous variety of knowledge concerning Japanese literary movements and cultures. It is required reading for those with an interest in modern Japan beyond the borders of Tokyo." -- Richard Torrance * The Ohio State University *
"Hoyt Long reinvents the single author study by examining the life and afterlife of Miyazawa Kenji to reveal the conditions of literary production that initially marginalized, then monumentalized Miyazawa's work. A sophisticated analysis that reframes 20th century literary history and its heroes." -- Louise Young, Professor of History * UW-Madison *
"Long's study not only provides us fresh insight into Miyazawa Kenji's oeuvre, but also into the complex relationship between the institutions of cultural (re-)production and the literary product; in so doing, his attention to 'the local' contributes to the destabilization of persistent notions of a singular, monolithic national Japanese literature." -- Edward Mack * University of Washington *
"Long's concentrated attention to place making in this book . . . allows Long to say much that is new and of consequence about [Miyazawa], while adding to our understanding of cultural production in Japan's interwar period, and of the complex structures that impact how meaning is assigned to locality." -- Sarah M. Strong *
Asian Studies Review *
"[Long's] detailed, theoretical study of place—both center and periphery in interwar Japan—illustrates how locality determines literary reception. . . Recommended." -- E. J. Hogan *
CHOICE *
"On one level, Hoyt Long's provocatively argued and historically grounded study illuminates the intellectual and cultural contributions of one of Japan's best loved literary writers. But it is much more; his theoretically sophisticated analysis sheds light on hierarchies of center and periphery in empire, networks of cultural flow, and the creative imagination's entanglement with society and ideas." -- Ann Sherif * Oberlin College *
