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Over the course of the last two decades, novelist Karen Tei Yamashita has reshaped the Asian American literary imagination in profound ways, and this book offers readers a critically engaged examination of her literary corpus. Crafted at the intersection of intellectual history, ethnic studies, literary analysis, and critical theory, the study goes beyond textual investigation to intervene in larger debates over postmodern representation, spatial materialism, historical form, and social and academic activism. Arguing that Yamashita's most important contribution is her incorporation of a North–South vector into the East–West conceptual paradigm, the author highlights the novelist's re-prioritization, through such a geographical realignment, of socio-economic concerns for Asian American literary criticism. In assessing Yamashita's works as such, the author designates her novelistic art as a form of new Asian American literary avant-garde that operates from the peripheries of received histories, aesthetics, and disciplines. Seeking not only to demonstrate the importance of Yamashita's transnational art, the book also sets new terms for ongoing dialogues in Asian American literary and cultural criticism. At the same time, it argues for the continuing relevance of Asian American literature as a self-reflexive and self-renewable critical practice.

At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, Japanese fiction pulsed with an urge to render good and evil in ways that evoked dramatic emotions. This book examines four enormously popular novels from this period by interweaving two threads of argument. Using approaches to melodrama developed in Western literary and film criticism, it first shows how these texts used their binary morality to construct a semblance of moral certainty in a moment of social transformation. The book then examines how the novels responded to a particular set of ideologies of the family, which the Japanese state attempted to use as an instrument of social control. The melodramatic novels of the Meiji period generated a plethora of alternative family models that explored the myriad ways in which human beings could connect in a modernizing culture. The fictional families in these works revealed the ties of the family to the nation, delineated traumatic changes in social hierarchy, and showed the effects of new discourses of gender. These powerful portrayals and the social discourses which surround them reveal that melodrama was a central mode of sensibility in Meiji culture.

This book draws from theories of the grotesque to examine many of the strange and extraordinary creatures and phenomena in the premodern Japanese tales called setsuwa. Grotesque representations in general typically direct our attention to unfinished and unrefined things; they are marked by an earthy sense of the body and an interest in the physical, and, because they have many meanings, can both sustain and undermine authority. The book aims to make sense of grotesque representations in setsuwa—animated detached body parts, unusual sexual encounters, demons and shape-shifting or otherwise wondrous animals—and, in a broader sense, to show what this type of critical focus can reveal about the mentality of Japanese people in the ancient, classical, and early medieval periods. It places Japanese tales of this nature, which have received little critical attention in English, within a sophisticated theoretical framework, focusing on them in the context of the historical periods in which they were created and compiled.

This book offers a rereading of the well-known Japanese writer Abe Kōbō, focusing on his essays as well as his fiction. Central attention is devoted to the concepts of time, writing, and community. For Abe, following Heidegger, the question of ontology was to be understood on the basis of time. Time, conceived ecstatically as that which is always outside of itself, demands that all temporal entities in the world be understood as bereft of any proper or original identity. In this account, identity can only be attributed retroactively in a movement that helps reveal the disjointed nature of time. The notion of writing appears as intrinsically linked to time, for time only gives itself through an inscription that remains from the past and carries on into the present and future. The relation between time and writing necessarily affects the manner in which community is formed, for no community can simply be grounded on a preexisting identity. Directly to the contrary, the creation of such collective identity must be made in all contingency. The book provides readings of such canonical Abe texts as Suna no onna [The Woman in the Dunes] and Tanin no kao [The Face of Another] while also analyzing lesser- known works such as the essay “Uchinaru henkyō” [The Frontier Within] and the interview collection (with Donald Keene) entitled Hangekiteki ningen [The Anti-Theater Person].

This book traces the relationship between the law and literature in Iran to reveal the profound ambiguities at the heart of Iranian ideas of modernity regarding women's rights and social status. It reveals how novels mediate legal reforms, and examines how authors have used realism to challenge and re-imagine notions of “the real.” The chapter examines seminal works that foreground acute anxieties about female subjectivity in an Iran negotiating its modernity from the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 up to and beyond the Islamic Revolution of 1979. By focusing on marriage as the central metaphor through which both law and fiction read gender, the author critically engages and highlights the difficulties that arise as gender norms and laws change over time. She examines the recurrent foregrounding of marriage at five critical periods of legal reform, documenting how texts were understood both at first publication and as their importance changed over time.

As China's centrally planned economy and welfare state have given way to a more loosely controlled version of “late socialism,” public concern about economic reform's downside has found expression in epic novels about official corruption and its effects. While the media shied away from dealing with these issues, novelists stepped in to fill the void. “Anti-corruption fiction” exploded onto the marketplace and into public consciousness, spawning popular films and television series until a clampdown after 2002 that ended China's first substantial realist fiction since the 1989 Beijing massacre. With frankness and imagination seldom allowed journalists, novelists have depicted the death of China's rust-belt industries, the gap between rich and poor, “social unrest”—i.e., riots—and the questionable new practices of entrenched communist party rulers. This book examines this rebirth of the Chinese political novel and its media adaptations, explaining how the works reflect contemporary Chinese life and how they embody Chinese traditions of social criticism, literary realism, and contemplation of taboo subjects. It investigates such novels and includes excerpts from personal interviews with China's three most famous anti-corruption novelists.

After The Tale of Genji (c.1000), the greatest work of classical Japanese literature is the historical narrative The Tale of the Heike (13th–14th centuries). In addition to opening up fresh perspectives on the Heike narratives, this study draws attention to a range of problems centered on the interrelationship between narrative, ritual space, and Japan's changing views of China as they bear on depictions of the emperor's authority, warriors, and marginal population going all the way back to the Nara period. By situating the Heike in this long temporal framework, the author sheds light on a hidden history of royal authority that was entangled in Daoist and yin-yang ideas in the Nara period, practices centered on defilement in the Heian period, and Buddhist doctrines pertaining to original enlightenment in the medieval period, all of which resurface and combine in Heike's narrative world. In introducing the full range of Heike narrative to students and scholars of Japanese literature, the author argues that we must also reexamine our understanding of the literature, ritual, and culture of the Heian and Nara periods.

This book is an account of classical Japanese poetics, based on the two concepts of emptiness (jo-ha-kyū) and temporality (mujō) that ground the medieval practice and understanding of poetry. It clarifies the unique structure of the collective poetic genre called renga (linked poetry) by analyzing Shinkei's writings, particularly Sasamegoto. The book engages contemporary Western theory, especially Jacques Derrida's concepts of différance and deconstruction, to illuminate the progressive displacement that constitutes the dynamic poetry of the renga link as the sequence moves from verse 1 to 100. It also draws on phenomenology, Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the dialogical, Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method, hermeneutics, and the concept of translation to delve into philosophical issues of language, mind, and the creative process. Furthermore, the book traces the development of the Japanese sense of the sublime and ineffable (yūgen and its variants) from the identification, by earlier waka poets such as Shunzei and Teika, of their artistic practice with Buddhist meditation (Zen or shikan), and of superior poetry as the ecstatic figuration of the Dharma realm. It constitutes a new definition of Japanese poetry from the medieval period onward as a symbolist poetry, a figuration of the sacred rather than a representation of nature, and reveals how the spiritual or moral dimension is essential to an understanding of traditional Japanese aesthetic ideals and practices, such as Nô performance, calligraphy, and black-ink painting.

This book elucidates the historical distinctiveness and significance of the seminal nineteenth-century Russian poet, playwright, and novelist Mikhail Iurevich Lermontov (1814–1841) by demonstrating that his works illustrate the condition of living in an epoch of transition. Lermontov's particular epoch was that of post-Romanticism, a time when the twilight of Romanticism was dimming but the dawn of Realism had yet to appear. Through close and comparative readings, the book explores the singular metaphysical, psychological, ethical, and aesthetic ambiguities and ambivalences that mark Lermontov's works and reflect the transition out of Romanticism and the nature of post-Romanticism. Overall, it reveals that, although confined to his transitional epoch, Lermontov did not succumb to it; instead, he probed its character and evoked its historical import. And the book concludes that Lermontov's works have resonance for our transitional era in the early twenty-first century as well.

This book is the story of the emergence and development of writing for children in modern Korea. In the 1920s, a narrator-adult voice began to speak for the first time directly to a child-reader whose mind was deemed knowable and moldable. Writers and educators saw the qualities of this unique child audience manifest in a new concept called the child-heart, or tongsim. This book examines children’s literature at the moment the child emerged as a powerful metaphor of Korea’s future, through the colonization of Korea, and up until the ideological entrenchment that intensified in the post-liberation period. By reading children’s periodicals against the political, educational, and psychological discourses of their time, this book argues that the child-heart concept was particularly productive for the project of modernity and nation-building, as well as for the colonial and postcolonial projects of socialization and nationalization, because it posited the child in a symbiotic relationship with the natural world that allowed for explorations of the meaning of culture and nature at a time when culture and nature were deeply contested. This book reveals a trajectory of Korean children’s prose and poetry that begins with depictions of the child as an organic part of nature and ends with the child as the agent of the control of nature. Ultimately, the book reveals the complex ways the figure of the child became a driving force of nostalgia that stood in for future aspirations for the individual, family, class, and nation.

When Freudian sexual theory hit China in the early twentieth century, it ran up against competing models of the mind from both Chinese tradition and the new revolutionary culture. Chinese theorists of the mind—both traditional intellectuals and revolutionary psychologists—steadily put forward the anti-Freud: a mind shaped not by deep interiority that must be excavated by professionals, but shaped instead by social and cultural interactions. Chinese novelists and film directors understood this focus and its relationship to Mao Zedong's revolutionary ethos, and much of the literature of twentieth-century China reflects the spiritual qualities of the revolutionary mind. This book investigates the continual clash of these contrasting models of the mind provided by Sigmund Freud and revolutionary Chinese culture, and explores how writers and filmmakers negotiated with the implications of each model.

Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910) has had an intriguing relationship with China that is not as widely known as it should be. Although he never visited the country, he has played a significant role in speaking for the Chinese people at home and abroad. After his death, his Chinese adventures did not stop, for his body of works continued to travel through China in translation throughout the twentieth century. If Twain were still alive, he would certainly be elated to hear that his most famous work, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), alone has gone through no less than ninety different Chinese translations traversing China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. It is indeed hard to imagine translations of this one work of Twain anywhere else in the world coming close to such a staggering figure. Looking at Twain in various Chinese contexts—his response to events involving the American Chinese communities and the Chinese across the Pacific, his posthumous journey through Chinese translation, as well as China’s response to him, Mark Twain in China points to the repercussions of Twain in a global theater. It highlights the cultural specificity of concepts such as “race,” “nation,” and “empire,” and helps us rethink alternative legacies of them in countries that have dramatically different dynamics of race and culture from that of the US.

This is a complete, annotated translation of Sasamegoto (1463–64), considered the most important and representative poetic treatise of the medieval period in Japan because of its thoroughgoing construction of poetry as a way to attain, and signify through language, the mental liberation (satori) that is the goal of Buddhist practice. Sasamegoto reveals the central place of Buddhist philosophy in medieval Japanese artistic practices. Shinkei (1406–1475), the author of the treatise, is himself a major poet, regarded as the most brilliant among the practitioners of linked poetry (renga) in the Muromachi period. Along with the extensive annotations, the editor's commentaries illuminate the significance of each section of the treatise within the context of waka and renga poetics, of the history of classical Japanese aesthetic principles in general and of Shinkei's thought in particular, and the role of Buddhism in the contemporary understanding of cultural practices such as poetry.

The history of literary and artistic production in modern Japan has typically centered on the literature and art of Tokyo, yet cultural activity in the country's regional cities and rural towns was no less vibrant. This book recovers pieces of this neglected history through the figure of Miyazawa Kenji (1896–1933). While alive, he remained a mostly unknown and unread provincial author whose experiments with narrative fiction, amateur theater, and farmer's art reveal an intense determination to reimagine and remake his native place, in the northeast of Japan, meaningful. Today, Miyazawa is one of the most recognized figures in Japan's modern literary canon. The story of his radical posthumous rise presents an opportunity to examine the larger history of how writing and other forms of artistic practice have intersected with place-based identity and the uneven geography of cultural production. This book-length study of Miyazawa centers on Miyazawa's life and writing to recreate a sense of what it was to write about and remake place from a spatially marginal position in the cultural field.

The documents emerging from the secret police archives of the former Soviet bloc have caused scandal after scandal, compromising revered cultural figures and abruptly ending political careers. This book offers a revealing and responsible approach to such materials. Taking advantage of the partial opening of the secret police archives in Russia and Romania, the author focuses on their most infamous holdings—the personal files—as well as on movies the police sponsored, scripted, or authored. Through the archives, she gains new insights into the writing of literature and raises new questions about the ethics of reading, showing how police files and films influenced literature and cinema, from autobiographies to novels, and from high-culture classics to avant-garde experiments and popular blockbusters. In so doing, the author opens a fresh chapter in the heated debate about the relationship between culture and politics in twentieth-century police states.

This book examines the late Qing reforms from the perspective of the talented and prolific woman writer Xue Shaohui and the reform-minded members of her social and intellectual networks. It moves attention from the well-known male historical actors of 1898 to the long-obscured women reformers and their male collaborators, and broadens the conventional focus on the “Hundred Days” to cover a much longer time period, from China’s Self-Strengthening effort beginning in the 1860s to the New Policies of the early twentieth century, which included the constitutional movement. Probing these players’ participation in, and responses to, the important events of the day through reading their literary, journalistic, and translational works, this book offers a different, more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the reform era than any previous work. It shows in particular that late Qing women reformers were not merely passive objects of male concern, but rather active, optimistic, autonomous, and self-sufficient agents of reform. Drawing upon intellectual and spiritual resources from the freewheeling Wei-Jin (220-420) xianyuan (worthy ladies) model and the late imperial writing-women culture, and open to Western ideas and knowledge, they went beyond the inherited Confucian pattern in their quest for an ideal womanhood and an ideal social order. Demanding equal political and educational rights with men, women reformers challenged leading male reformers’ nationalistic approach of achieving “wealth and power” for China, championing instead to unite women of all nations in an effort to create a just and harmonious new world.

This book examines Chinese poetry and courtier culture using the concept of shengse—sound and sight—which connotes “sensual pleasure.” Under the moral and political imperative to avoid or even eliminate representations of sense perception, premodern Chinese commentators treated overt displays of artistry with great suspicion, and their influence is still alive in modern and contemporary constructions of literary and cultural history. The Yongming poets, who openly extolled “sound and rhymes,” have been deemed the main instigators of a poetic trend toward the sensual. Situating them within the court milieu of their day, the author asks a simple question—What did shengse mean to the Yongming poets? By unraveling the aural and visual experiences encapsulated in their poems, she argues that their pursuit of “sound and sight” reveals a complex confluence of Buddhist influence, Confucian value, and new sociopolitical conditions. Her study challenges the old perception of the Yongming poets and the common practice of reading classical Chinese poems for semantic meaning only.

This book investigates the modern Chinese moral imagination through the figure of the stranger. Strangers are outsiders who come into our communities and stay with us, bringing alien manners and values with them and never quite renouncing their mobility. They are a threat to a community’s peace and order, but they also promise change and renewal. In modern China, the stranger has been a ubiquitous figure that tests the moral limits of a society known for the primacy of consanguinity and familiarity. This book employs the concepts of kinship sociality and stranger sociality to map out the moral dilemmas and responses set in motion by the coming of strangers. It surveys the Chinese moral landscape by following the itineraries of several groups of strangers—foreigners, peasant migrants in cities, bourgeois intellectuals in exile, disenfranchised class enemies, uncloistered women, animals on the edge of human society, and apparitions in a secular age—across a range of narrative and visual genres from the late imperial period to the new millennium. It makes a twofold argument: that the pervasive sense of moral crisis in contemporary China has roots in both the Confucian and socialist pasts, and that imaginative literature is the best training ground for coping with the quintessential condition of modernity in which strangers are routinely thrown together.

Twentieth-century Chinese literature has been characterized by an obsession with the future, an obsession that is often commented on but rarely scrutinized. Most studies of Chinese literature conflate the category of the future with notions of progress and nation-building, and with the utopian visions propagated by the Maoist and post-Mao developmental state. The future thus understood has often been seen as a “destination” a preconceived endpoint that is propagated, at times even imposed, by a center of power. By contrast, Tales of Futures Past introduces the concept of “anticipation” as a lens through which to reexamine the textual, institutional, and experiential aspects of Chinese literary culture from the 1950s through the first decade of the twenty-first century. Anticipation names the “future in the present,” the expectations that permeate life as it unfolds and that are often mediated by literary texts. Each of the book’s five chapters details how different modes of anticipation find expression in contemporary Chinese literature, with a focus on fictional genres. Each chapter explores how emotions such as hope and fear as well as ideas on “what may come next” find concrete expression in a variety of Chinese texts and institutional contexts, ranging from science fiction to translation journals and from modernist writing to environmental literature, with the aim of tracing overlooked continuities throughout the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century, and thus refining our understanding of Chinese socialist and postsocialist literary modernity.

Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry argues against reductive modes of reading Asian American poetry. The book builds its case by focusing with great particularity on the writings of five contemporary Asian American poets who range in age from their early forties to late sixties—Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, John Yau, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Pamela Lu—and whose poems represent a spectrum of literary styles, from expressive lyric to less transparently representational and more formally experimental. Each poet’s body of work is considered in turn through detailed readings, a formal crux or mode (metaphor, irony, parody, a syntax of contingency, the subjunctive mood) whose deployment is central to his or her poetic project and whose structure articulates and enacts in language the poet’s working out of a larger political (in the broadest sense of that term) and/or poetic concern or question. By doing intensive and serious readings of these particular Asian American poets’ use of language and linguistic forms this book aims to show how erroneous we have been to view Asian American poetry through a simplistic, reductive, and essentializing lens: as a homogenous lump of ’nonliterary’ writing by ’Asians.’