The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism / Edition 1

by Alan Tansman

Overview

In this wide-ranging study of Japanese cultural expression, Alan Tansman reveals how a particular, often seemingly innocent aesthetic sensibility—present in novels, essays, popular songs, film, and political writings—helped create an "aesthetic of fascism" in the years leading up to World War II. Evoking beautiful moments of violence, both real and imagined, these works did not lead to fascism in any instrumental sense. Yet, Tansman suggests, they expressed and inspired spiritual longings quenchable only through acts in the real world. Tansman traces this lineage of aesthetic fascism from its beginnings in the 1920s through its flowering in the 1930s to its afterlife in postwar Japan.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520245051
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	08/12/2009
Series:	Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Alan Tansman is Agassiz Professor of Japanese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Writings of Kôda Aya, a Japanese Literary Daughter and editor, with Dennis Washburn, of Studies in Modern Japanese Literature: Essays and Translations in Honor of Edwin McClellan.

Table of Contents

Preface
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism

1. Modernist Beginnings: Akutagawa Ryjnosuke and Kobayashi Hideo

2. The Beauty of Violence: Yasuda YojjrQ's “Japanese Bridges”

3. Objects of the Sublime in Literary Writing: Yasuda YojjrQ, Yanagi S_etsu, Kawabata Yasunari, and Shiga Naoya

4. The Rhetoric of Unspoken Fascism: The Essence of the National Polity

5. Sentimental Fascism on the Screen: Mother under the Eyelids

6. An Aesthetics of Devotion: Kobayashi Hideo's Cultural Criticism

7. Filaments of Fascism in Postwar Times

Coda: Reading Fascist Aesthetics
Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"A groundbreaking contribution to an exciting and newly developing field."—Journal of Japanese Stds

"Alan Tansman's The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism . . . all in all, well-argued and thoroughly convincing."—Monumenta Nipponica

Editorial Reviews

...well-argued and thoroughly convincing.

Monumenta Nipponica

The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism makes a groundbreaking contribution to an exciting and newly developing field and no doubt will provide much food for thought for future researchers on this important subject.

Journal of Japanese Studies

Alan Tansman’s The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism . . . all in all, well-argued and thoroughly convincing.

Monumenta Nipponica - Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit

A groundbreaking contribution to an exciting and newly developing field.

Journal Of Japanese Stds - Roy Starrs