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E-book The Writing of Disaster - Literary Representations of War, Trauma and Earthquakes in Modern Japan

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Penilaian

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In the past few years a number of book-length English-language studies of the cultural dimensions of disasters in modern Japan have appeared in print.2 The question arises: Why do we need another? The reason is that none of these books concentrates solely on literature, as this book does, and only a few of the volumes treat the disaster spawned by World War II—the most destruc-tive military conflict in Japanese history. This volume has a deliberate focus on both the literature that emerged from World War II, with four chapters on this topic, and also the literature that resulted from the two major earthquakes that have struck Japan over the course of over the last hundred years—incor-porating the writing inspired by one of the major floods of the prewar period—with another four chapters investigating these subjects. One additional chap-ter examines the fiction of a well-known contemporary Okinawan author.3Also, in this volume, World War II encompasses the Japanese military excur-sions onto the Asian continent, and thus includes the so-called “Fifteen Years’ War” (1931–1945) in its purview. The small number of volumes previously pub-lished examining the literature of war and earthquakes in Japan have almost always focused exclusively on fiction, but this volume has an equal focus on both poetry and fiction. In this sense, this volume breaks new ground in its attempt to draw together and analyze as a single phenomenon the literature produced by these tragedies.4The literature borne out of war, earthquake and flood, similarly literature that dramatizes disasters, has been explored in some depth by scholars of European literature—Maurice Blanchot’s famous 1980 book L’Ecriture du Dé-sastre(translated as The Writing of the Disaster)—is emblematic, and also by scholars of English literature: Kate McLoughlin’s Authoring War (2011) and Christopher Coker’sMen at War (2014) are two representative studies of war literature.5 Nor do I need to gesture to the many distinguished studies of the Holocaust and modern literature, which have poured forth from presses over many decades, or the select group of books in English on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and literature.6 Yet the topic of disasters (especially dealing with the disaster of World War II) and writing, save for the important exception of atomic bomb literature, hardly figures at all in English-language studies of modern Japanese literature.7 Thus this vol-ume is charting a pioneering path rather than ploughing the well-tilled ground of previous scholarship. This book will examine only a select number of literary representations of war, flood and earthquakes in twentieth and twenty-first century Japan. The literary works all fall into the two categories of prose, both fictional and non-fictional, and poetry (inclusive of free verse and such traditional varieties of verse as tanka and haiku).8 My selection of the disasters treated in the book is, I trust, judicious, since the literature produced by the two most destructive earthquakes to strike Japan over the course of over the last hundred years and the most terrible war ever experienced by Japan in its long history are all sub-jected to detailed scrutiny. Nonetheless, other tragedies exist that are not dealt with here. For instance, the literature of the Russo-Japanese conflict of 1905 is not treated within these pages. And, because of the manifest need for a much greater depth of analysis than can be permitted in a broad study of disaster such as this volume represents, nor do I examine literature dealing with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (although this book does make use of some of the methodologies employed by scholars to analyze these tragicevents).

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

410 MOR t

Penerbit

Switzerland : Peter Lang International Academic Publishers., 2020

Deskripsi Fisik

276 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9783631808290

Klasifikasi

410

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Linguistics

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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