Newcomers in the City: Reading Japanese and Chinese Literary Modernism in the Inter-war Period

Value

£ 3787.50

Partners and collaborators

Waseda University

Description

This project engages with the body, memory and senses that are manifested in 20th-century Japanese literature. Shiyi aims to further the argument advanced by the current studies that interwar modernist literature was not shaped through the adoption of Western culture but instead as a reaction towards the socio-historical context of the 1920s and 1930s Tokyo. There has been very limited study of Murō Saisei's works in English. What a writer like Saisei incorporated in their sensory experiences as the aesthetic bedrock of their creative works provides a fresh perspective on the connection between modernist literature and the history of modernity. The ways in which Saisei’ perceived metropolitan space is worth further discussion because they offered new perspectives for examining the relationship between the urban landscape and the writer in the East Asian context, which is often considered to be predominantly imaginative. This perspective explores how the writers’ lived experiences, as represented in their fictional and autobiographical writings, and interactions with their time and environment influenced their creative expressions, offering alternative phenomenologies that contribute to the current debates on Japanese modernism.