Afterlives of Letters

Afterlives of Letters dismantles modern literature's self-mythologization as a break with the past by showing that East Asian authors created modern literature through conscious engagement with the literary heritage of classical Chinese. -- Christopher L. Hill, author of <i>Figures of The World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form</i> In this impressively multilingual and theoretically sophisticated analysis, Hashimoto reexamines claims that modern East Asian literature was either a radical departure from preceding classical traditions or was directly grounded on those same national traditions. Instead, Hashimoto contends that this literature was haunted by its classical legacies while also being thoroughly transnational in its contemporary incarnations. -- Carlos Rojas, author of <i>Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation in Modern China</i> Expansive in scope and meticulous in detail, Afterlives of Letters revises the established view that modern literature emerged in East Asia as a thorough break with the region’s shared cultural past. It liberates the founding fathers of “national literatures” in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan from their imposed canonicity, and enlivens transregional and transtemporal aspects of their writerly practices. -- Youngju Ryu, author of <i>Writers of the Winter Republic: Literature and Resistance in Park Chung Hee’s Korea</i> By reuse, repetition, and parody, the authors in Satoru Hashimoto’s wide-ranging, meticulous, and original study made Asian modernity out of the ruins of their classical culture, as they dared to imagine freedom from old-style and new-style empires. Literary history in its complexity here illuminates the needs of the present. -- Haun Saussy, author of <i>The Making of Barbarians: Chinese Literature and Multilingual Asia</i> Putting Chinese, Japanese, and Korean authors in transnational dialogue, Satoru Hashimoto brilliantly delineates how East Asian writers grappled with Western modernity while forging their own modernity from local traditions. -- Ban Wang, author of <i>At Home in Nature: Technology, Labor, and Critical Ecology</i>