The Typographic Imagination : Reading and Writing in Japan’s Age of Modern Print Media

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. __The Typographic Imagination__ presents a multivalent vision of the rise of mass print media and the transformation of modern Japanese literature, language, and culture. 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, The Typographic Imagination brings into conversation a wide array of materials, including bookseller trade circulars, language reform debates, works of experimental fiction, photo gazetteers, socialist periodicals, Esperanto primers, declassified censorship documents, and printing press strike bulletins. 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. "A study of how Japan's modern commercial print revolution transformed ideas and practices of prose, language, philosophy, and politics. The book explores the habituation of new forms of reading and writing from the last years of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth, as the publishing industry made mass-produced books and magazines an inexorable part of everyday life. The book argues that this process precipitated a consciousness of the typographic text as a material medium and economic artifice with the power to critique and remake the modern world. Drawing from extensive archival research, with materials ranging from Meiji-era magazines to bookseller trade journals, strike bulletins, Esperanto primers, and declassified secret government censorship reports, The Typographic Imagination provides a layered, prismatic vision of Japanese literature, language, and culture in the age of modern mass media"-- Provided by publisher