Manufacturing modern Japanese literature : publishing, prizes, and the ascription of literary value
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Manufacturing modern Japanese literature : publishing, prizes, and the ascription of literary value
(Asia-Pacific : culture, politics, and society)
Duke University Press, 2010
- : pbk
- : cloth
Available at 25 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [297]-310) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Emphasizing how modes of book production, promotion, and consumption shape ideas of literary value, Edward Mack examines the role of Japan's publishing industry in defining modern Japanese literature. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, as cultural and economic power consolidated in Tokyo, the city's literary and publishing elites came to dominate the dissemination and preservation of Japanese literature. As Mack explains, they conferred cultural value on particular works by creating prizes and multivolume anthologies that signaled literary merit. One such anthology, the Complete Works of Contemporary Japanese Literature (published between 1926 and 1931), provided many readers with their first experience of selected texts designated as modern Japanese literature. The low price of one yen per volume allowed the series to reach hundreds of thousands of readers. An early prize for modern Japanese literature, the annual Akutagawa Prize, first awarded in 1935, became the country's highest-profile literary award. Mack chronicles the history of book production and consumption in Japan, showing how advances in technology, the expansion of a market for literary commodities, and the development of an extensive reading community enabled phenomena such as the Complete Works of Contemporary Japanese Literature and the Akutagawa Prize to manufacture the very concept of modern Japanese literature.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Publishing and the Creation of an Alternative Economy of Value 1
1. Modernity as Rupture: The Concentration of Print Capital 17
2. The Stability of the Center: Tokyo Publishing and the Great Kanto Earthquake 51
3. The Static Canon: Kaizosha's Complete Works of Contemporary Japanese Literature 91
4. Defining and Defending Literary Value: Debates, 1919-1935 139
5. The Dynamic Canon: The Akutagawa and Naoki Prizes for Literature 181
Epilogue 223
Appendix 237
Notes 243
Works Cited 297
Index 311
by "Nielsen BookData"