The Influence of American Literature in Taishō and Prewar Shōwa Japan

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ken Inoue
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Japanese Literature ◽  
Great Earthquake ◽  
Proletarian Literature ◽  
Gone With The Wind ◽  
Upton Sinclair ◽  
Taisho Era ◽  
Colloquial Style

In the history of modern Japanese literature, the Taishō era (1912–1926) is retrospectively identified as a period characterized by a liberal arts ideology, individualism, a democratic spirit, aestheticism, and anti-naturalism. In the latter half of the Taishō era, the liberal arts ideology was gradually replaced by socialism. After the Great Earthquake of 1923, Japanese literature was enmeshed in a triangular contest between the old-fashioned “‘I’ novel” (or psychological novel), proletarian literature, and modernist literature (especially the neo-sensualists). This structure of the literary world, in parallel with the rise of popular literature, continued into the prewar Shōwa era (1926–1945). During the Taishō era, Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe were the most influential and respected American writers. Whitman’s writing offered Taishō writers, including Takeo Arishima and poets of the popular poetry school, a model of living that was free and natural and a colloquial-style free verse. But for the modern Japanese literati from the Taishō to the prewar Shōwa era, the most influential American writer was without a doubt Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s works served as a creative inspiration to Taishō novelists such as Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Haruo Satō, and Ryūosuke Akutagawa, many of whom shared a creative perspective that was based on a blend of anti-naturalism and aestheticism. Influenced by Poe, they attempted diverse variations on the themes of the fantastic and of doppelgängers and even experimented with detective stories. Needless to say, Poe helped to establish the detective story genre in Japan through Rampo Edogawa and others. For early Shōwa literati, Poe was a forerunner of modern critical theory. Among Japanese readers, around 1920, American literature ceased to be read as a sub-branch of British literature and began to be read as American literature proper. From the Great Earthquake and up through the prewar Shōwa era, three distinctive periods can be discerned when American literature was energetically translated and introduced. The first period was from the end of Taishō to the start of Shōwa, when American “socialist” literature—in the broad sense of writers like Upton Sinclair—left a deep mark on Japanese proletarian literature. The second period was around 1930–1931, when contemporary modernist American novels were translated and published in various anthology forms. The third peak came around 1935–1938, when bestselling American historical romances or epics such as Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind were published and gained a large readership.

American Obscurantism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Lurie
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
William Faulkner ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Hart Crane ◽  
Stanley Kubrick ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Racial History ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Ongoing Development

American Obscurantism argues for a salutary indirection in U.S. culture. From its earliest canonical literary works through films of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the most compelling manifestations of America’s troubled history have articulated this content through a unique formal and tonal obscurity. Envisioning the formidable darkness attending racial history at nearly every stage of the republic’s founding and ongoing development, writers such as William Faulkner and Hart Crane, and directors like the Coen brothers and Stanley Kubrick, present a powerful critique of American conquest, southern plantation culture, and western frontier ideology. American Obscurantism engages the basis of these explorations in Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville, each of whom present notable occlusions in their characters’ racial understanding, an obtuseness or naivety that is expressed by a corresponding formal opacity. Such oblique historicity as the book describes allows a method at odds with—and implicitly critical of—the historicizing trend that marked literary studies in the wake of the theoretical turn. The book thus restores an emphasis on aesthetic and medium-specific features to argue for a formalist historicity. Working through challenges to an implicitly white, bourgeois, heteronormative polity, American Obscurantism posits an insistent, vital racial otherness at the heart of American literature and cinema. It examines this pattern across a canon that shows more self-doubt than assuredness, arguing for the value of openness and questioning in place of epistemological or critical certainty.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. xviii-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Gerald Kennedy ◽  
Scott Peeples
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
First Century ◽  
Global Literature ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
Critical Approaches

Edgar Allan Poe has long occupied a problematic place in discussions of American literature. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, an intensive reexamination of his relationship to nineteenth-century print culture and the controversies of Jacksonian America reframed our understanding of his work. Whereas scholars once regarded his dark fantasies as extraneous to American experience, we now recognize the complex and nuanced ways in which Poe’s work responded to and questioned core assumptions of American culture. The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe offers a wide-ranging exploration of Poe, rereading his works through a variety of critical approaches and illuminating his ultimate impact on global literature, art, and culture. The introduction to the volume traces the development of scholarship on Poe from the time of his death in 1849 to the beginning of the twenty-first century, exploring the future possibilities for the study of Poe in the digital era.

The Early American Qur'an: Islamic Scripture and US Canon

2009 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Einboden
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
American Renaissance ◽  
Early American Literature ◽  
Washington Irving ◽  
Early American ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Although considerable scholarly attention has been paid to US Orientalism in the nineteenth century, there remains no targeted study of the formative influence exercised by the Qur'an upon the canon of early American literature. The present paper surveys receptions, adaptations and translations of the Qur'an during the ‘American Renaissance’, identifying the Qur'anic echoes which permeate the seminal works of literary patriarchs such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe. Examining the literary and religious tensions raised by antebellum importations of Islamic scripture, the essay interrogates how the aesthetic contours of the Qur'an in particular serve both to attract and obstruct early US readings, mapping the diverse responses to the Muslim sacred generated by American Romantics and Transcendentalists.

scholarly journals The eye looks back: Seeing and being seen from William Bartram to H.P. Lovecraft

2018 ◽  
pp. 157-172
Author(s):  
Marek Wilczyński
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Charles Brockden Brown ◽  
Niagara Falls ◽  
Evil Eye ◽  
William Bartram ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Main Factor

The paper focuses on the sense of sight and seeing in the selected texts of American literature from the late 18th century to the 1930s, i.e. from William Bartram to H. P. Lovecraft. Adopting a perspective of changing “scopic regimes” – conventions of visual perception presented in a number of literary and non-literary works, the author analyzed a passage from Bartram’s Travels to reveal a combination of the discourse of science with that of the British aesthetics of gardening. In Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes (1843) the main factor is the work of imagination dissatisfied with the actual view of Niagara Falls, while in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature substantial subjectivity is reduced to pure seeing. In Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Ktaadn” the subject confronts nature that is no longer transparent and turns out meaningless. In American literature of horror from Charles Brockden Brown through Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, the narrator’s eye encounters the inhuman gaze of a predator, a dehumanized victim of murder, or a sinister creature from the out-er space. To conclude, the human gaze was gradually losing its ability to frame or penetrate nature, bound to confront the annihilating evil eye from which there was usually no escape.

Japanese Proletarian Literature during the Red Decade, 1925–1935

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Bowen-Struyk
Keyword(s):  
Japanese Literature ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
Factory Workers ◽  
Proletarian Literature ◽  
Modern Japanese Literature ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Masses ◽  
The Cold War

Modern Japanese literature emerged as Japan asserted itself as a military-industrial power from the end of the 19th through the early 20th centuries. The subject of modern literature was worthy of a seat at the table of the world’s powers, or so goes the story of a literary canon all too often focused on the legitimacy of elites. But modern literature is not only about a male alienated intellectual failing to have a satisfying relationship. During the international “red decade” (1925–1935), proletarian writers in Japan as elsewhere sought to harness and transform the technology of modern literature in order to represent the hitherto un- or underrepresented women and men, peasants and factory workers, elderly and children in order to bring the masses into consciousness of their collective power. For a decade, nearly every writer in Japan engaged the energetic but often divided proletarian movement as they sought to grasp the challenges of a rapidly modernizing society, transformation in the family and gender, dual economy, worldwide depression, and escalating imperialism. Largely overlooked during the Cold War, this important decade of modern literature has experienced a well-deserved scholarly and popular revival in a period of 21st-century precarity, protests against privilege, and questioning of media and representation. Two exemplars from proletarian literature—Hayama Yoshiki’s “The Prostitute” (1925) and Miyamoto Yuriko’s “The Breast” (1935)—offer a frame to apprehend the richness of genre, voice, storytelling, experimentation, and ethics in proletarian literature, a vital part of modern literature.

scholarly journals Investigating Lexical Cohesive Devices in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” in Arabic Translation

لارك ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (40) ◽  
pp. 1155-1135
Author(s):  
Khalida H. Tisgam Asst. Prof.
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Arabic Translation ◽  
Lexical Cohesion ◽  
Cohesive Devices ◽  
Full Explanation

With the aim of investigating the lexical cohesive devices, a short story from the American literature; namely, “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, is taken as the data of study. The study adopts the framework of Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) by which two major categories of lexical cohesion; reiteration and collocation, are examined. To make the investigation possible, a full explanation of the lexical cohesive devices in both English and Arabic is presented to have a vivid image of the differences and similarities between them and to discuss their possible effect on translation. The results obtained reveal that lexical cohesion in Poe’s short story is founded on repetition, synonymy and collocation but the inadequate command of these devices by the translator leads to the distortion of translation

The Beat Ecologies of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac

2018 ◽  
pp. 129-168
Author(s):  
Sarah Daw
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Zen Buddhism ◽  
Japanese Literature ◽  
Beat Generation ◽  
Jack Kerouac ◽  
Allen Ginsberg ◽  
Human Relationship ◽  
Literature And Philosophy ◽  
Philosophical Writing ◽  
Starting Point

Chapter Four develops the previous chapter’s investigation into the substantial influence of translated Chinese and Japanese philosophical writing on presentations of an ecological Nature in Cold War American literature. However, it differs in its countercultural focus, exploring the influence of Americanised translations of Chinese and Japanese literature and philosophy on the work of the Beat Generation writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Ginsberg and Kerouac’s extensive correspondence reveals the two writers’ developing interest in Taoist and Zen Buddhist thought, and their co-development of their own Americanised and highly inauthentic ‘Beat Zen’, which was heavily influenced by Dwight Goddard’s A Buddhist Bible (1932). Taking these letters as its starting point, the chapter reveals that translated Taoism and Zen Buddhism informed each writer’s ecological depictions of the human relationship to Nature in some of their most famous contributions to Beat literature, including Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums (1958) and Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956).

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