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
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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"
