Afterlives of Letters: The Transnational Origins of Modern Literature in China, Japan, and Korea (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University)

When East Asia opened itself to the world in the nineteenth century, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean intellectuals had shared notions of literature because of the centuries-long cultural exchanges in the region. As modernization profoundly destabilized cultural norms, they ventured to create new literature for the new era. Satoru Hashimoto offers a novel way of understanding the origins of modern literature in a transregional context, drawing on Chinese-, Japanese-, and Korean-language texts in both classical and vernacular forms. He argues that modern literature came into being in East Asia through writerly attempts at reconstructing the present's historical relationship to the past across the cultural transformations caused by modernization. Hashimoto examines writers' anachronistic engagement with past cultures deemed obsolete or antithetical to new systems of values, showing that this transnational process was integral to the emergence of modern literature. A groundbreaking cross-cultural excavation of the origins of modern literature in East Asia featuring remarkable linguistic scope, Afterlives of Letters bridges Asian studies and comparative literature and delivers a remapping of world literature. "A study of how literature in its modern, aesthetic sense emerged in late-nineteenth- to early twentieth-century China, Japan, and Korea in a transregional cultural context. This book argues that modern literature came into being in East Asia through writerly attempts at reconstructing the present's historical relationship to the past across the profound cultural transformations caused by modernization. Hashimoto's argument renews our understanding of modern literature--one of the most culturally iconic and sociopolitically consequential institutions--in the region by locating its origins in writers' anachronistic engagement with past cultures, rather than in their progressive departure therefrom as most existing studies do. Afterlives of Letters is the first monograph to be written in any language that offers a cross-cultural examination of the inceptions of modern literature in East Asia by straddling the threshold between the modern and the premodern, and engaging Chinese-, Japanese-, and Korean-language primary materials in both classical and vernacular forms. It makes a significant original contribution to the emerging body of scholarship at the intersection of area studies and comparative literature and makes a novel intervention in contemporary discourse on world literature"-- Provided by publisher