American Literature in Japanese Shojo Comics

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hisayo Ogushi
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
American Literature ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Louisa May Alcott ◽  
Young Female ◽  
Educational Systems ◽  
Frances Hodgson Burnett ◽  
Meiji Era ◽  
Jean Webster ◽  
Shojo Manga

In the Meiji era, the modernization of Japan was achieved through the process of the westernization of political, military, and educational systems. Accordingly, the Japanese willingly acquired and learned Western thought by translating literary resources for Japanese readers: the works of writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne were frequently translated and introduced at this time. Concurrently, Japanese girls belonging to the urban middle class began to form their own institutionalized culture called shojo, through which they could communicate their interests in literature or art, and/or share aspects of their ordinary school lives. Shojo culture was supported by newly founded magazines targeting schoolgirls with names like Shojo Sekai, Shojo-kai, Shojo-no-tomo, and Jogaku Zasshi. In Japanese shojo, articles on American women and translated literary pieces written by American and European authors, including Frances Hodgson Burnett, were popular. The work of female American writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, and Jean Webster was also translated as juvenile literature for Japanese children. Thus, American culture and literature significantly influenced the Japanese shojo culture. Nobuko Yoshiya, a well-known Japanese author of so-called girls’ novels, stated that she followed Western female writers such as Alcott, Burnett, and George Eliot. The Japanese translations of American literature decreased considerably during World War II. After the war, this literary corpus was rediscovered and was widely translated for Japanese audiences under the supervision of the General Headquarters (GHQ) or the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP). In addition to novels for girls, comics for young female readers (shojo manga) also aroused readers’ interest and became immensely popular. Some manga writers depicted Western settings in their narratives and innumerable “American girls” whose exotic and fashionable aura fascinated Japanese girls. These made-in-Japan “American girls” primarily represented the concept of liberty, autonomy, and abundance: qualities desired by Japanese schoolgirls. At the end of the 20th century, however, the representation of America in the genre of shojo manga gradually became more realistic and less enraptured.

Reviews: Written Work: Langland, Labor, and Authorship, England's Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation 1399–1422, Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching, the Making of Jacobean Culture, the Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric and Fiction, 1500–1800, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel, the Scottish Invention of English Literature, Dante and the Victorians, George Eliot and Italy: Literary, Cultural and Political Influences from Dante to the Risorgimento, the Imperial Game: Cricket, Culture and Society, Ideologies of Epic: Nation, Empire and Victorian Epic Poetry, Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work and Home, Women's Fiction between the Wars: Mothers, Daughters and Writing, British Women Writers of World War II: Battleground of Their Own, the Tyranny of the Discrete: A Discussion of the Problems of Local History in England, Issues of Regional Identity: In Honour of John Marshall, Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect, Criticism and Modernity: Aesthetics, Literature and Nations in Europe and its AcademiesJusticeSteven and Kerby-FultonKathryn (eds), Written Work: Langland, Labor, and Authorship , University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 347, £42.75.StrohmPaul, England's Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation 1399–1422 , Yale University Press, 1998, pp. xiv + 274, £25.McCulloughPeter E., Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching , Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. xv + 237, £35PerryCurtis, The Making of Jacobean Culture , Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. xiv + 281, £35.KelleyDonald R. and SacksDavid Harris (eds), The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric and Fiction, 1500–1800 , Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. xii + 374, £50.JarvisRobin, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel , Macmillan, 1997, pp. x + 246, £45.CrawfordRobert (ed.), The Scottish Invention of English Literature , Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 259, £35.MilbankAlison, Dante and the Victorians , Manchester University Press, 1998, pp. ix + 277, £45.00ThompsonAndrew, George Eliot and Italy: Literary, Cultural and Political Influences from Dante to the Risorgimento , Macmillan, 1998, pp. x + 243, £42.50.SandifordKeith A. and StoddartBrian (eds), The Imperial Game: Cricket, Culture and Society , Manchester University Press, 1998, pp. viii + 178, £40.00.GrahamColin, Ideologies of Epic: Nation, Empire and Victorian Epic Poetry , Manchester University Press, 1998, pp. 194, £40.CohenMonica F., Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work and Home , Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 216, £35.InghamHeather, Women's Fiction Between the Wars: Mothers, Daughters and Writing , Edinburgh University Press, 1998, pp. 180, £40, £14.95 pbLassnerPhyllis, British Women Writers of World War II: Battleground of Their Own , Macmillan, 1998, pp. 293, £45.MarshallJ. D., The Tyranny of the Discrete: A Discussion of the Problems of Local History in England , Scolar Press, 1997, pp. vii + 152, £40RoyleEdward (ed.), Issues of Regional Identity: In Honour of John Marshall , Manchester University Press, 1998, pp. xi + 252, £40.DriverFelix and GilbertDavid (eds), Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity , Manchester University Press, 1999, pp. 283, £45.WhiteHayden, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect , Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, pp. 205, £31.50.DohertyThomas, Criticism and Modernity: Aesthetics, Literature and Nations in Europe and its Academies , Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. vi + 248, £40.

2000 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-116
Author(s):  
Karen L. Edwards ◽  
Peter Coss ◽  
Michael Hicks ◽  
Graham Parry ◽  
R. C. Richardson ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Regional Identity ◽  
Local History ◽  
Historical Imagination ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Politics And Religion ◽  
Pedestrian Travel ◽  
Court Politics

Italian-American Literature

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Military Service ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Ample Evidence ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Italian American ◽  
American Schools ◽  
Immigrant Experience

The earliest Italian American writers were immigrants who learned English and responded to their experience in America through poetry and prose, more often than not found in the early Italian language newspapers. Few had mastered the English language, and so their contributions to literature were not considered to be American. In fact, early-20th-century immigrants from Italy to the United States were hesitant to even to refer to themselves as Americans. The literature produced during this period provides great insights into the shaping of American identities and into the obstacles that these immigrants faced in pursuing their versions of the American Dream. The rise of Fascism in Italy of the 1920s–1940s would have a tremendous effect on those identities. One of the earliest Italian Americans to voice his opinion of Italian Fascism in his poetry was Arturo Giovannitti, who, with Joseph Ettor, had organized the famous 1912 Lawrence Mill Strike. National awareness of writers as Italian Americans would not begin until the likes of John Fante and Pietro di Donato published in the late 1930s. Fiction published prior to World War II primarily depicted the vexed immigrant experience of adjustment in America. The post–World War II years brought the arrival of more immigrants as serious producers of American art. Among the early writers were returning soldiers, such as Mario Puzo and Felix Stefanile, often the first of their families to be literate and attend American schools, especially with the help of the GI Bill. While many of the writers were busy capturing the disappearance of the immigrant generation, others were continuing the radical traditions. Government investigations into Communism through the House Committee on Un-American Activities sparked the ire of many Italian American artists. Increased mobility through military service and education in American schools brought Italian American writers into contact with the world outside of Little Italy and opened their imaginations and creativity to modernist experiments. Those who would gain recognition as members of the “Beat movement” responded to an apolitical complacency that seemed to set in directly after the war by fusing art and politics profoundly to affect America’s literary scene. During a time when the very definition of “American” was being challenged and changed, Italian American writers were busy exploring their own American histories. America’s postwar feminist movement had a strong effect on the daughters of the immigrants. Social action, the redefinition of American gender roles, and the shift from urban to suburban ethnicity became subjects of the writing of many young Italian Americans who watched as their families moved from working- to middle-class life. Fiction produced in the 1980s and 1990s recreated the immigrant experience from the perspective of the grandchildren, who quite often reconnected to Italy to create new identities. Contemporary Italian American literature demonstrates a growing literary tradition through a variety of styles and voices. Critical studies, beginning with Rose Basile Green’s The Italian American Novel (1974), reviews, the publication of anthologies, journals, and the creation of new presses are ample evidence that Italian American culture has gained understandings of its past as it develops a sense of a future.

Toward a Declaration of Interdependence; or, Interrogating the Boundaries in Twentieth-Century Histories of North American Literature

PMLA ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 118 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marietta Messmer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
American Literature ◽  
North American ◽  
Russian Formalism ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

The instrumentalization of nineteenth-century literary historiography in the project of literary and cultural nation building has become a critical commonplace, as Claudio Guillén (6) and David Perkins (4), among many others, have outlined. Beginning with John Neal's American Writers (1824–25), nineteenth-century histories of North American literature emphatically embraced this nationalist paradigm, striving to identify and defend the “American” qualities in America's newly emergent national literature. But when called on, at the beginning of the twentieth century, to justify the establishment of American literature departments in universities across the country, literary histories were, especially during the 1920s and 1930s, under even greater pressure to prove the extent to which American literature is indeed American (Vanderbilt 186–91). Although the rise of New Criticism and the influence of Russian formalism after World War II saw a temporary setback to American historiographical nationalism (Spengemann, Mirror 154), the subsequent institutionalization of American studies took place in the context of the cold war, and the 1960s, in particular, brought a renewed emphasis on the (for the most part nationally oriented) sociopolitical and historical contextualization of American literature. And even the shift to intra-American cultural pluralism in the wake of trans- and subnational challenges to traditional notions of the nation-state throughout the past few decades has all too frequently been accompanied by renewed attempts to establish a revised version of historiographical nationalism.

scholarly journals Employment and Labor Union Laws in Japan between the 1889 and 1946 Constitutions: A Comparative Study

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 128-142
Author(s):  
Afrah Mohammed Ali
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Child Labor ◽  
Labor Union ◽  
Analytical Methodology ◽  
American Occupation ◽  
Future Goals ◽  
Meiji Era ◽  
The Government ◽  
Labor System

This research is based on the descriptive and analytical methodology. The importance of studying labor laws and labor unions in Japan between 1889 and 1946 constitutions is because Japan was out of a feudal phase, and had no idea about the factory system and industrialization in their modern sense before the Meiji era. Generally, its labor system used to be mostly familial, and the economic system was based on agriculture. This called for the enactment of legislations and laws appropriate for the coming phase in Meiji era. Thus, this paper examines the role of Meiji government in enacting labor legislations and laws when he came to power in 1896, and his new constitution in 1889 and the civil code of 1896. It further examines the way Meiji government and the following Japanese governments until the end of World War II did not abide by Meiji laws and stipulations of the constitution with their abusive actions in ending the workers’ strikes and disputes, with the inequality between genders in labor and wages, and the use of child labor in factories in an inhuman way. The paper clarifies the role of the American occupation of Japan (1945-1952) after dissolving Meiji constitution and legislations and the government measures that followed them to enact new legislations, laws and constitution for Japan on November 3, 1946, which was active in May 3, 1947. The paper has concluded that the American occupation policy of Japan was able to avoid the dissidence of millions of Japanese workers, whose level of livelihood was deteriorating after their country lost the war, and convert them from a dissident group against the occupation to a peaceful group which did not target the occupation in their future goals.

scholarly journals Ideology in Polish Translations of Anglo-American Literature

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-123
Author(s):  
Paweł Marcinkiewicz
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Realistic Fiction ◽  
Revolutionary Movements ◽  
Anglo American

Ideology has always influenced translation, yet this fact became a topic of scholarly research only in the 1990s. The working of ideology in literary translations most often manifests itself as a conflict of value systems. From vast reservoir of foreign sources, the native axiology absorbs values that it needs to sustain its culture. It is not a coincidence that Anglo-American literature, propagating ideas of democracy and individual freedom, became popular in Poland in the first half of the nineteenth-century when Poland did not exist as a state. Only a century later, American literature was the most popular of all foreign literatures in pre-1939 Poland. World War II changed this situation, and the Soviet-controlled apparatchiks favored translations that were “politically correct.” Yet, because of their connections with earlier revolutionary movements, avant-garde Anglo-American writers were often published during the communist regime, for example Virginia Woolf, whose novels were standardized to appeal to the tastes of popular readers. After Poland regained independence in 1989, the national book market was privatized and commercialized, and avant-garde literature needed advertising to get noticed. Cormack McCarthy’s novels were translated into Polish on the wave of popularity of the Coen brothers movie based on No Country for Old Men. The two Polish translations of McCarthy’s novel try to sound like a typical hard-boiled realistic fiction. This is where the ideology of consumerism meets the ideology of communism: literature is a means to sustain – and control – a cultural monolith, where all differences are perceived as possible threats to social order.

scholarly journals Repression and Realism in Postwar  American Literature 1945-1955

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Erin Mercer
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Philip Roth ◽  
Repetition Compulsion ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
Realist Novels ◽  
Cultural Conformity

<p>This thesis focuses on the uncanny in literature produced in America during the first decade following World War II. The period between 1945 and 1955 was marked by repressive socio-political forces such as McCarthyism and cultural conformity which complicated the representation of what Philip Roth refers to as "demonic reality." I explore the ways in which the avoidance and minimisation of the unpleasant created a highly circumscribed version of postwar American life while also generating a sense of objectless anxiety. According to the theories of Sigmund Freud, repression inevitably stages a return registered as the "uncanny." Animism, magic, the omnipotence of thoughts, the castration complex, death, the double, madness, involuntary repetition compulsion, live burial and haunting are all deemed capable of provoking a particular anxiety connected to what lies beneath the surface of accepted reality. Although it is common to argue that fantasy genres such as science fiction and gothic represent the return of what is repressed, this thesis explores several realist novels displaying uncanny characteristics. The realist novels included here are uncanny not only because they depict weird automaton-like characters, haunting, and castration anxieties, thus exhibiting a conscious use of Freudian theory, but because the texts themselves act as the return of the repressed. Norman Mailer referred to this unsettling phenomenon when he described writing as the "spooky" art; spooky because although a writer might sit down to consciously write a particular story, another unwilled story might very well appear.</p>

Agriculture and Asian American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah D. Wald
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Alternative Food Movement ◽  
Economic Exploitation ◽  
Asian American History ◽  
Carlos Bulosan ◽  
Hisaye Yamamoto

Agriculture is a significant yet understudied theme in Asian American literature. Representations of farming in Asian American literature often respond to and engage with agriculture’s important role in Asian American history. As farmers and as farm laborers, Asian Americans have been pivotal to US agriculture, and this agricultural experience was foundational to the formation of Asian American communities in the period prior to World War II. Additionally, literary representations of agriculture in Asian American literature navigate racialized traditions of American pastoral and Jeffersonian agrarianism. They have often done so in ways that highlight the systems of racial and economic exploitation at work in US society and position US agribusiness in relationship to US colonialism and neo-colonialism. Consequently, Asian American literature’s representations of farming can expose the assumptions around race, property, and citizenship at work in the agrarianism of the 21st-century US alternative food movement. The writings of Carlos Bulosan, Hisaye Yamamoto, and David Mas Masumoto provide case studies of these trends.

scholarly journals The Presentation of Shoah Events to Students at Various Educational Levels: A Review

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Milan Mašát ◽  
Jana Sladová ◽  
Kristýna Šmakalová ◽  
Anna Bínová
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Educational Systems ◽  
Jewish State ◽  
World War ◽  
Literary Education ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Review Study

The review study deals with the presentation of methods of acquainting pupils and students with the Shoah events at various levels of institutional education. Based on the opinions and positions of leading experts on the subject, we summarize the most important methods in the field. In the introduction we present the importance of one line of the events of World War II in the 21st century world: the defined phenomenon can be perceived as a warning against certain forms of stigmatization, ostracism or as a warning against the need to protect democratic political order. In the paper we define the terms Shoah, Holocaust, anti-Semitism and racism. We also deal with the Israeli public schools in the area of teaching about the Shoah, with the curricular anchorage of the terms Shoah and Holocaust and with the potential of Literary Education in the field of Shoah presentation. We believe that the educational system of the Jewish state can be a model in the area of implementation of the defined phenomenon for the educational systems of other countries. At the same time, we summarize the most important research surveys dealing with the teaching of the Shoah in Israel. In the area of methods are in more detail introduced “The Survivors´ Heritage”, “The Historical Approach”, “Multi-Level Approach” and “An Interdisciplinary Approach”.

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