
The Culture of the Quake
The Great Kanto Earthquake and Taisho Japan
Alex Bates(Author)
Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan (Publisher)
Will be published approx. on 4. December 2015
Book
Paperback/Softback
228 pages
978-1-929280-86-5 (ISBN)
Description
The Culture of the Quake is first and foremost an exploration of Taisho-era narrative fiction. Every major film studio produced earthquake films, and authors from I-novelists to modernists, proletarian writers to popular fiction writers wrote something on the earthquake. In every case pre-existing attitudes toward their work shaped the way these people represented the earthquake, and yet the overwhelming destruction and mass suffering also posed particular challenges in representation. How could one show the pain without exploitation? Other scholars have looked at some of these groups of writers or filmmakers individually, but there are no studies looking at how they each tackled a similar subject. The Great Kanto Earthquake is an understudied event that has only recently caught the attention of scholars. By focusing on the way it was represented in high and low culture, The Culture of the Quake gives insight into how people experienced the disaster and how they interpreted it in the years following. This book should be of interest to scholars of Japanese and Asian literature, film, culture, and history, and scholars of disaster studies.
Reviews / Votes
"A seminal work that will help shape scholarly debate on this topic for a ling time to come."--Journal of Japanese Studies * Journal of Japanese Studies *
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Michigan
United States
Publishing group
The University of Michigan Press
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-929280-86-5 (9781929280865)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Alex Bates is Associate Professor of Japanese language and literature at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He received his B.A. from Brigham Young University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. His research interests in