Afterlives of letters : the transnational origins of modern literature in China, Japan, and Korea / Satoru Hashimoto.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Intro -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Conventions -- Introduction -- Part I: A Multilayered Contact Space in Turn-of-the-Century East Asia -- 1. 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 �Ogai, and Yi Kwangsu -- 4. History as Rewriting: The Historical Fiction of Lu Xun, Mori �Ogai, and Yi Kwangsu

Part III: Japan's Imperial Mimicry and Its Critique -- 5. 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

"A study of how literature in its modern, aesthetic sense emerged in late-nineteenth- to early twentieth-century China, Japan, and Korea in a transregional cultural context. This book argues that modern literature came into being in East Asia through writerly attempts at reconstructing the present's historical relationship to the past across the profound cultural transformations caused by modernization. Hashimoto's argument renews our understanding of modern literature--one of the most culturally iconic and sociopolitically consequential institutions--in the region by locating its origins in writers' anachronistic engagement with past cultures, rather than in their progressive departure therefrom as most existing studies do. Afterlives of Letters is the first monograph to be written in any language that offers a cross-cultural examination of the inceptions of modern literature in East Asia by straddling the threshold between the modern and the premodern, and engaging Chinese-, Japanese-, and Korean-language primary materials in both classical and vernacular forms. It makes a significant original contribution to the emerging body of scholarship at the intersection of area studies and comparative literature and makes a novel intervention in contemporary discourse on world literature"-- Provided by publisher.

Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on October 12, 2023).

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