Beauty Matters: Modern Japanese Literature and the Question of Aesthetics, 1890–1930

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Anri Yasuda

Beauty Matters

Modern Japanese Literature and the Question of Aesthetics, 1890–1930

Anri Yasuda

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English

Columbia University Press
21 June 2024

Series: Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

The notion of beauty is inherently elusive: aesthetic judgments are at once subjective and felt to be universally valid. In Beauty Matters, Anri Yasuda demonstrates that by exploring the often conflicting yet powerful pull of aesthetic sentiments, major authors of the late Meiji (1868–1912) and Taishō (1912–1926) periods illuminated themes and perspectives that resonated broadly in modern Japanese society. This approach presents an alternative to conventional accounts in which Japanese literature before the modernist turn of the 1920s has tended to be defined by an insular focus on subjective representation and autobiographical realism.

Yasuda investigates how Natsume Sōseki, Mori Ogai, Mushanokōji Saneatsu and his peers at Shirakaba magazine, and Akutagawa Ryünosuke sought to identify the aesthetic properties of literature through comparisons with the visual arts. They also considered the position of Japanese cultural sensibilities within the Eurocentric imperial world order. Their stories featuring painters and paintings weigh the fundamental challenge of representing anything when the conditions of knowledge are in flux, and their stories about cross-cultural encounters display both hope and ambivalence about the prospect of cosmopolitanism. Yasuda shows how thinking about beauty and art enabled these authors to surpass purely ""literary"" concerns. By tracing the wide-reaching significance of aesthetic affect in literary thought, Beauty Matters destabilizes received conceptions of literature's parameters and affirms literature's continued potential to intervene in cultural discourses in Japan and beyond.

By: Anri Yasuda
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9780231210638
ISBN 10: 0231210639
Series: Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Pages: 304
Publication Date: 21 June 2024
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Acknowledgments A Note on Sources and Translations 1. Modern Japanese Literature and Aesthetics 2. Natsume Sōseki’s Quest for “A Feeling of Beauty” 3. Mori Ogai and the “Inner Flame” of Beauty 4. Mushanokōji Saneatsu and the Early Shirakaba’s Artistic Cosmopolitanism 5. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s Literary Anxieties and the “Power to Remake” Epilogue: Why Aesthetics? Notes Bibliography Index

Anri Yasuda is an assistant professor of Japanese in the Department of East Asian Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Virginia.

Reviews for Beauty Matters: Modern Japanese Literature and the Question of Aesthetics, 1890–1930

In this bold rereading of four literary giants from the Meiji-Taishō period – Sōseki, Ōgai, Akutagawa and Mushanokōji – Anri Yasuda deftly analyzes their aesthetics while also revealing the ideology and critical engagement that lie behind their artistic ideals. Placing the writers in dialogue with each other, Yasuda shows how they understood ‘literature’ as a conceptual register to think through real-world questions, connecting closely with their subject matter and their readers, then and now. -- Rachael Hutchinson, author of <i>Nagai Kafū's Occidentalism: Defining the Japanese Self</i>