Dreams of Difference - The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity

From 1935 to 1945, the Japan Romantic School (Nihon Romanha), a group of major intellectuals and literary figures, explored issues concerning politics, literature, and nationalism in ways that still influence cultural discourse in Japan today. Kevin Doak's timely study is a broad critique of modernity in early twentieth-century Japan. He uses close readings and translations of texts and poems to suggest that the school's interest in romanticism stemmed from its attempt to surmount the "cultural crisis" of lost traditions. This attempt to overcome modernity eventually reduced the movement's earlier critical impulses to expressions of nationalist longing.

List of contents

Acknowledgments
Prologue: Nationalism, Romanticism, and the Problem of Modernity

1. Toward an Ironic Praxis: Yasuda Yojuro and the Aesthetics of Totality
2. Indeterminate Poetics: The Romantic Style
3. Return to Parnassus: The Exoticism of the Self
4. The Ethics of Identity: Kamei Katsuichiro and the Search for a New Subject
5. The Production of a Culture of the Same

Epilogue: Romanticism Rehabilitated
Appendixes
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the author

Kevin M. Doak is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Chanpagne.

Summary

A study of an early 20th-century intellectual movement which explored issues of politics, literature and nationalism in a manner that continues to influence Japan today. The author argues that the School's interest in romanticism stemmed from its attempt to overcome an impression of lost tradition.

Product details

• Authors: Kevin Michael Doak, Doak Kevin Michael
• Publisher: University Of California Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 01.07.1994
• EAN: 9780520083776
• ISBN: 978-0-520-08377-6
• No. of pages: 244
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > Regional and national histories; Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; Japan, History of Ideas, HISTORY / Social History, Social & cultural history, HISTORY / Asia / Japan, Social and cultural history, c 1938 to c 1946 (World War Two period), Asian History, c 1919 to c 1939 (Inter-war period), c 1939 to c 1945 (including WW2), c 1918 to c 1939 (Inter-war period)