The Typographic Imagination: Reading and Writing in Japan’s Age of Modern Print Media

Nathan Shockey

Published by Columbia University Press 2019

The Typographic Imagination

Reading and Writing in Japan’s Age of Modern Print Media

Nathan Shockey

In the series Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

https://doi.org/10.7312/shoc19428

Overview
Contents

About this book

Nathan Shockey examines the emergence of new forms of reading, writing, and thinking in Japan from the last years of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth. The Typographic Imagination presents a multivalent vision of the rise of mass print media and the transformation of modern Japanese literature, language, and culture.

Author / Editor information

Nathan Shockey is assistant professor of Japanese at Bard College.

Reviews

Seiji Lippit, University of California, Los Angeles:
The Typographic Imagination is an innovative study whose strengths include scrupulous scholarship, clear prose, and lucid analysis. The book makes a substantial contribution to the field of modern Japanese literary and cultural studies. I recommend it with enthusiasm!

Ann Sherif, Oberlin College and Conservatory:
Shockey’s engaging and erudite study lays out beautifully the complex and changing technological, social, and intellectual landscape that informed Japan’s early modern and modern book worlds. This meticulously researched study expands our understanding of the literary field by interrogating the intersections of script reform, the transition from xylographic to industrial printing, new modes of book classification, and the crucial contributions of leftist movements to literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Thomas Lamarre, Duke University:
Rich in detail and vast in scope, The Typographic Imagination deftly charts a course through the roiling complexity of print media that collectively generated a typographic effect in the early twentieth century. But the stroke of genius lies in how the perspective of print allows Shockey to overturn our understanding of modernization, highlighting a pulse of nonlinear difference coursing through print media, resurfacing intensified in strange new characters and movements.

Andrew Piper, McGill University:
Shockey does an amazing job of chronicling a transformative moment in the history of Japanese literature. Canons were transformed, new classes of readers emerged, and vivacious debates about the meaning and diversity of literature's materiality were produced. This book offers an important addition to the global history of print.

Indra Levy, Stanford University:
Nathan Shockey’s study of the typographic imagination in modern Japan reorganizes our sensibilities by seamlessly integrating media studies with modern Japanese literary history and criticism. Its fresh perspective is sure to change the conceptual landscape of Japan specialists, and its rich account of the particularities of modern Japanese print culture will command the attention of media studies scholars as well.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
A NOTE ON ROMANIZATION AND TRANSLATION Publicly Available Download PDF	xiii
Introduction: The World Made Type Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PART I. The Making of a Modern Media Ecology
Chapter One. Pictures and Voices from a Paper Empire Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	25
Chapter Two. Iwanami Shoten and the Enterprise of Eternity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	59
Chapter Three. The Topography of Typography: Bibliophiles and Used Books in the Print City Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	91
PART II. Prose, Language, and Politics in the Type Era
Chapter Four. New Age Sensations: Yokomitsu Riichi and the Contours of Literary Discourse Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	127
Chapter Five. Brave New Words: Orthographic Reform, Romanization, and Esperantism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	159
Chapter Six. The Medium Is the Masses: Print Capitalism and the Prewar Leftist Movement Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	194
Conclusion: Ends, Echoes, and Inversions Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	231
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	243
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	273
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	293

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;

eBook

Published: December 16, 2019
ISBN: 9780231550741