Search results for ""author atsuko ueda""
University of California Press Language, Nation, Race: Linguistic Reform in Meiji Japan (1868-1912)
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.Language, Nation, Race explores the various language reforms at the onset of Japanese modernity, a time when a “national language” (kokugo) was produced to standardize Japanese. Faced with the threat of Western colonialism, Meiji intellectuals proposed various reforms to standardize the Japanese language in order to quickly educate the illiterate masses. This book liberates these language reforms from the predetermined category of the “nation,” for such a notion had yet to exist as a clear telos to which the reforms aspired. Atsuko Ueda draws on, while critically intervening in, the vast scholarship of language reform that engaged with numerous works of postcolonial and cultural studies. She examines the first two decades of the Meiji period, with specific focus on the issue of race, contending that no analysis of imperialism or nationalism is possible without it.
£27.00
Stanford University Press Concealment of Politics, Politics of Concealment: The Production of "Literature" in Meiji Japan
What is "literature?" The answer to this question may seem self-evident to us now. However, the production of literature as a category was in fact a very complex historical process that engaged with varying forces of modernity. Concealment of Politics, Politics of Concealment illuminates the large picture of intellectual, political, and literary culture of 1880s Japan and offers a paradigm-shattering discussion of the creation of literature as a cultural category. Literature emerged out of ongoing negotiations with modernizing and globalizing impulses that governed Meiji Japan (1868–1912). This complex process is too often concealed by literary studies that assume that Japanese literary modernity began with Tsubouchi Shōyō's The Essence of the Novel (1885-6). This view has long confined the discussion of literature to very narrow terms. By recasting the Shōyō's work in the political and intellectual domains, Concealment of Politics, Politics of Concealment not only explores the interaction of different discourses in 1880s Japan but offers a rigorous critique of our own approaches to the history of modern Japanese literature.
£60.30
Columbia University Press Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings
Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) was the foremost Japanese novelist of the twentieth century, known for such highly acclaimed works as Kokoro, Sanshiro, and I Am a Cat. Yet he began his career as a literary theorist and scholar of English literature. In 1907, he published Theory of Literature, a remarkably forward-thinking attempt to understand how and why we read. The text anticipates by decades the ideas and concepts of formalism, structuralism, reader-response theory, and postcolonialism, as well as cognitive approaches to literature that are only now gaining traction. Employing the cutting-edge approaches of contemporary psychology and sociology, Soseki created a model for studying the conscious experience of reading literature as well as a theory for how the process changes over time and across cultures. Along with Theory of Literature, this volume reproduces a later series of lectures and essays in which Soseki continued to develop his theories. By insisting that literary taste is socially and historically determined, Soseki was able to challenge the superiority of the Western canon, and by grounding his theory in scientific knowledge, he was able to claim a universal validity.
£27.00
