商品簡介
Readers worldwide have long been drawn to the foreign, the exotic. and the alien, even before Freud's famous essay on the uncanny in 1919. Given Japan's many years of relative isolation. followed by its multicultural empire, these themes seem particularly ripe for exploration and exploitation by Japanese writers. Their literary adventures have taken them inside Japan as well as outside, and how they internalized the exotic through the adoption of modernist techniques and subject matter forms the primary focus of this book.
The Alien Within is the first book-length thematic study in English of the alien in modern Japanese literature and helps shed new light on a number of important authors. Morton examines the Gothic. a form of writing with strong affinities to Europe and a motif in the fiction of several key modern Japanese writers, such as Arishima Takeo. Morton also discusses the translations of Tsubouchi Shoyo, Japans most famous early translator of Shakespeare, and how this most alien and exotic author was absorbed into the Japanese literary and theatrical tradition. The new field of translation theory and how it relates to translating Shakespeare are also discussed.
The Alien Within breaks new ground in its treatment of the exotic in modern Japanese writing and in its discussion of authors and work hitherto absent from critical discussions in English.
作者簡介
Leith Morton is professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
