Transformations in Print: The Re-creation, Reception, and Representation of Edo-period Fiction in Turn-of-the-Century Japan.

Abstract

This is a dissertation about the material production and circulation of books of Japanese literature in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japan and their relationship to literary developments during this time. It is an attempt to explore one moment of the messy past of reproduction and to locate a temporally specific reappropriation of texts through reprinting during this time. In so doing, it aims to repopulate that moment with things—books, covers, and bookshelves—and with people—publishers, readers, and writers—each of which helped shape and give meaning to old and new texts. Hence, this dissertation concerns both some of the more familiar—and forgotten—people, texts, textual formats, and technologies that influenced the development of Japanese literature during these decades. More specifically, following the sociology of texts—paying attention to texts as material objects and products of social creation and recreation—this dissertation studies reprints of Edo-period (1604-1868) fiction to trace long-term developments in Japanese literature across the Meiji (1868-1912) and early Taisho (1912-1926) periods. It shows how Meiji-period publishers, such as Mori Senkichi, took advantage of new technologies and legal reforms to produce a widely available canon of reprints of Edo-period fiction for a growing reading and book-owning audience. The saturation of the literary field with reprints of Kyokutei Bakin, Santo Kyōden, and other Edo authors were perhaps equally important in shaping literature as were imported European literary conceptions and translations. It considers the reproduction and circulation of literature from a number of perspectives and concerning several topics: For instance, the rediscovery of Ihara Saikaku is reconsidered as a reaction to the circulation of Bakin. Reprints, together with Mori Ōgai’s marginalia, are used to reveal a plurality of reading practices and sites of literary interest. Descriptions of books found in Natsume Sōseki’s novels are used to explore generic classifications and the social functions of books as objects in literature and photographs of authors. Ultimately, it seeks to rediscover not only the local and personal spaces and ways of reading but also to remind us how literature is more than words on a page and should be appreciated in terms of its communal and material past.