Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature
By the turn of the twentieth century, Japan’s military and economic successes made it the dominant power in East Asia, drawing hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese students to the metropole and sending thousands of Japanese to other parts of East Asia. The constant movement of peoples, ideas, and texts in the Japanese empire created numerous literary contact nebulae, fluid spaces of diminished hierarchies where writers grapple with and transculturate one another’s creative output.

Drawing extensively on vernacular sources in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, this book analyzes the most active of these contact nebulae: semicolonial Chinese, occupied Manchurian, and colonial Korean and Taiwanese transculturations of Japanese literature. It explores how colonial and semicolonial writers discussed, adapted, translated, and recast thousands of Japanese creative works, both affirming and challenging Japan’s cultural authority. Such efforts not only blurred distinctions among resistance, acquiescence, and collaboration but also shattered cultural and national barriers central to the discourse of empire. In this context, twentieth-century East Asian literatures can no longer be understood in isolation from one another, linked only by their encounters with the West, but instead must be seen in constant interaction throughout the Japanese empire and beyond.

1131292577
Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature
By the turn of the twentieth century, Japan’s military and economic successes made it the dominant power in East Asia, drawing hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese students to the metropole and sending thousands of Japanese to other parts of East Asia. The constant movement of peoples, ideas, and texts in the Japanese empire created numerous literary contact nebulae, fluid spaces of diminished hierarchies where writers grapple with and transculturate one another’s creative output.

Drawing extensively on vernacular sources in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, this book analyzes the most active of these contact nebulae: semicolonial Chinese, occupied Manchurian, and colonial Korean and Taiwanese transculturations of Japanese literature. It explores how colonial and semicolonial writers discussed, adapted, translated, and recast thousands of Japanese creative works, both affirming and challenging Japan’s cultural authority. Such efforts not only blurred distinctions among resistance, acquiescence, and collaboration but also shattered cultural and national barriers central to the discourse of empire. In this context, twentieth-century East Asian literatures can no longer be understood in isolation from one another, linked only by their encounters with the West, but instead must be seen in constant interaction throughout the Japanese empire and beyond.

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Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature

Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature

by Karen Laura Thornber
Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature

Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature

by Karen Laura Thornber

Hardcover

$59.95 
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Overview

By the turn of the twentieth century, Japan’s military and economic successes made it the dominant power in East Asia, drawing hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese students to the metropole and sending thousands of Japanese to other parts of East Asia. The constant movement of peoples, ideas, and texts in the Japanese empire created numerous literary contact nebulae, fluid spaces of diminished hierarchies where writers grapple with and transculturate one another’s creative output.

Drawing extensively on vernacular sources in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, this book analyzes the most active of these contact nebulae: semicolonial Chinese, occupied Manchurian, and colonial Korean and Taiwanese transculturations of Japanese literature. It explores how colonial and semicolonial writers discussed, adapted, translated, and recast thousands of Japanese creative works, both affirming and challenging Japan’s cultural authority. Such efforts not only blurred distinctions among resistance, acquiescence, and collaboration but also shattered cultural and national barriers central to the discourse of empire. In this context, twentieth-century East Asian literatures can no longer be understood in isolation from one another, linked only by their encounters with the West, but instead must be seen in constant interaction throughout the Japanese empire and beyond.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780674036253
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publication date: 11/30/2009
Series: Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series , #67
Pages: 550
Product dimensions: 6.30(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.90(d)

About the Author

Karen Laura Thornber is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University.

Table of Contents

Conventions Introduction: Empire, Transculturation, and Literary Contact Nebulae

1. Travel, Readerly Contact, and Writerly Contact in the Japanese Empire

Part I: Interpretive and Interlingual Transculturation

2. Transcultural Literary Criticism in the Japanese Empire

3. Multiple Vectors and Early Interlingual Transculturations of Japanese Literature

4. From Cultural Innovation to Total War

Part II: Intertextual Transculturation

5. Intertextuality, Empire, and East Asia

6. Spotlight on Suffering

7. Reconceptualizing Relationships: Individuals, Families, Nations

8. Questions of Agency: Raising Responsibility, Parodying Persistence, and Rethinking Reform

Epilogue: Postwar Intra–East Asian Dialogues and the Future of Negotiating Transculturally

Notes

Works Cited

Index

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