Buch, Englisch, 336 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 231 mm, Gewicht: 608 g
Reihe: Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Reading and Writing in Japan's Age of Modern Print Media
Buch, Englisch, 336 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 231 mm, Gewicht: 608 g
Reihe: Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
ISBN: 978-0-231-19428-0
Verlag: Columbia University Press
In the early twentieth century, Japan was awash with typographic text and mass-produced print. Over the short span of a few decades, affordable books and magazines became a part of everyday life, and a new generation of writers and thinkers considered how their world could be reconstructed through the circulation of printed language as a mass-market commodity. The Typographic Imagination explores how this commercial print revolution transformed Japan’s media ecology and traces the possibilities and pitfalls of type as a force for radical social change.
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. Charting the relationships among prose, politics, and print capitalism, he considers the meanings and functions of print as a staple commodity and as a ubiquitous and material medium for discourse and thought. Drawing on extensive archival research, Shockey brings into conversation a wide array of materials, including bookseller trade circulars, Esperanto primers, language reform debates, declassified censorship documents, photo gazetteers, socialist periodicals, printing press strike bulletins, and works of experimental fiction. Combining the rigorous close analysis of Japanese literary studies with transdisciplinary methodologies from media studies, book history, and intellectual history, The Typographic Imagination presents a multivalent vision of the rise of mass print media and the transformations of modern Japanese literature, language, and culture.
