Writing Violence: The Politics of Form in Early Modern Japanese Literature

Edo-period Japan was a golden age for commercial literature. A host of new narrative genres cast their gaze across the social landscape, probed the realms of history and the fantastic, and breathed new life into literary tradition. But how to understand the politics of this body of literature remains contested, in part because the defining characteristics of much early modern fiction-formulaicness, reuse of narratives, stock characters, linguistic and intertextual play, and heavy allusion to literary canon-can seem to hold social and political realities at arm's length.

David C. Atherton offers a new approach to understanding the relationship between the challenging formal features of early modern popular literature and the world beyond its pages. Focusing on depictions of violence-one of the most fraught topics for a peaceful polity ruled over by warriors-he connects concepts of form and formalization across the aesthetic and social spheres. Atherton shows how the formal features of early modern literature had the potential to alter the perception of time and space, make social and economic forces visible, defamiliarize conventions, give voice to the socially peripheral, and reshape the contours of community. Through careful readings of works by the major writers Asai Ryōi, Ihara Saikaku, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Ueda Akinari, and Santō Kyōden, Writing Violence reveals the essential role of literary form in constructing the world-and in seeing it anew.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Note to Readers
Introduction: The Problem, Promise, and Politics of Early Modern Literary Form
1. Creative Destruction: Remaking the World in Seventeenth-Century Disaster Literature
2. The Vengeance Variations: Revenge as Form in the Fiction of Ihara Saikaku
3. The (Un)crucified Lovers: Adultery, Punishment, and the “Truth” of Transgression
4. Ueda Akinari and the Form of Fiction: In Which a Brother is Celebrated for Beheading His Sister
5. Frontier Violence: Late Yomihon Form and the Bodies and Bounds of the Realm
Epilogue: Forms in Context, Forms Beyond Context
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the Author :
David C. Atherton is assistant professor of East Asian languages and civilizations at Harvard University.

Review :
Radically transforms understanding of 17th- and 18th-century commercial fiction in Japan . . . Atherton’s analyses are readable, detailed, and extensive. This book is a significant accomplishment. A revelatory work, one that will surely become a milestone in the study of early modern Japanese literature. It is very readable, with an arresting blend of elegant description and sharp analysis that will appeal to undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty alike. [An] elegantly written, richly theorized, and deeply thought-provoking monograph. By producing a theoretically engaged and thematically unified monograph spanning the conceptual chasm normally separating studies of early and late Tokugawa literature, Atherton has accomplished a major feat. Lucid, eloquent, nuanced, and deeply grounded, Writing Violence offers a new vision of what it meant to be "creative" in early modern Japan and new tools for teasing out the politics of early modern narrative works. It’s hard to overstate what a revelation this book is. Writing Violence is a deeply thoughtful and insightful rumination on early modern Japanese literature in its sociohistorical contexts. By addressing issues of cultural, political, and literary form in selected works from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, Atherton suggests brilliant new ways of reading and understanding the popular fiction of the age. Freeing early modern revenge and disaster stories from readings of political praise or subversion, Atherton’s bold and theoretically innovative study argues that their form was not formulaic, but an incubator of new perceptual possibilities. In prose that delights and surprises, Atherton shows that Edo authors re-signified violence, remade form, and rethought the power of fiction. This beautifully written book offers a fresh perspective on the literary politics of the Edo period. While it focuses on accounts of violence—fires and fights, theft and murder—it is also a lively and humorous introduction to the joys of early modern literature. With its rich close readings, Writing Violence clearly shows the importance of modular construction and “form” to the literature of early modern Japan and provides us with new ways of thinking about the relationship between a text and the outside world.