Rethinking Japanese Modernism

Many of the 26 contributions presented here were originally heard at the August 2009 Otago Conference on Japanese Modernism, U. of Otago, New Zealand, which is where the host of the conference and volume editor Roy Starrs is affiliated. He and other scholars of Asian culture address various aspects of modernism itself, Japanese fiction, prewar Japanese poetry and music, painting, popular culture and everyday life, and postmodernism in theater and fiction. Some specific topics include science, art, and ethics--variations of Japanese Buddhist modernism; Akutagawa Ryunosuke and August Strindberg; the travel poetry of Mori Michiyo; the department store in interwar Japan; and the influence of American melancholic modernism and emerging postmodernism on Murakami Haruki's early fiction. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Roy A. Starrs, Ph.D. (1986) in Asian Studies, University of British Columbia, teaches at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He has published extensively on Japanese literature and culture, most recently (as editor) Politics and Religion in Moderrn Japan (2011).