Rethinking Japanese Modernism PDF Download

This book studies the politics of British and Japanese modernism, partly in terms of comparative, post-comparative, and world literature understandings of a search for structural and formal similarities between texts arising from apparently different situations. It has a strongly national interest in that it takes neither Britain nor Japan for granted as pre-existing entities, but rather begins by historicizing, in terms of literary history, the cultural formation of these state bureaucracies as nations. The understanding of English Literature as a state-national field of cultural value is set against Japanese history, showing how the growth of (and antagonism to) the bureaucratic state between the 1860s and 1940s was played out in literary form. Gardiner addresses key contemporary problems in -- and about -- English Literature that takes account of recent thinking on national form, and considers the connection between literary history and formal political structures. The book explores familiar translated Japanese writers and also introduces untranslated writers in their historical contexts, setting them alongside some of the key texts of Anglophone radical modernism, and discovering surprising similarities that force us to rethink the idea that modernism was simply 'imported' by Japan after the 1860s. Gardiner's re-readings of modernism speak to a Japanese literary history which in some situations has taken Anglo-British methodology for granted.