Topographies of Japanese modernism

What happens when a critique of modernity - a "revolt against the traditions of the Western world" - is situated within a non-European context, where the concept of the modern has been inevitably tied to the image of the West?Seiji Lippit offers a study of Japanese modernist fiction from the 1920s to the 1930s.

Through close readings of four leading figures of this movement - Ryunosuke, Riichi, Yasunari and Fumiko - Lippit aims to establish a theoretical and historical framework for the analysis of Japanese modernism.As a critical category, modernism has been used to designate a broad range of literary and artistic practices in industrialized, urban environments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Yet, as a category of literary and art history, modernism subsumes a wide range of heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory practices.

For this reason, a significant amount of critical energy has recently been directed toward the establishment of further internal distinctions of modernism in Japan and in traditional Western contexts.