| 研究開始時の研究の概要 |
Studying how female and non-metropolitan authors negotiated their public personae in early 20th-century Japan, I will examine the formation of a new idea of authorship as a universalist “individual creative genius,” that was nevertheless implicitly limited in terms of gender and ethnicity.
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| 研究実績の概要 |
In 2023, I continued my research on poet and novelist Otsuka Kusuoko (1875-1910). I broadened my view to include her contemporary publishing world between the mid-1890s and her death, studying both Otsuka's writing in journals and the critical discourse around her work. My current conclusion is that Otsuka was attempting to build a new image of female authorship that matched her social position as an upper-class mother, while expanding the range of appropriate themes for that public persona. Her attempt was ultimately unsuccessful because, even though her fiction was well-received among her contemporaries, the critical and publishing world was fixated on the "keishu sakka" as the only possible model for female authorship, and effectively weaponized the figure of Higuchi Ichiyo (1872-1896) as canonized after her death in order to police female writing. It would not be until the publication of the journal _Seito_ in 1911 that the critical mass of discourse would be present for a "new woman" authorship to emerge, but that was too late for Otsuka.
At the Waseda University Brussels Office I held the workshop “New Directions in Modern Japanese Culture: Comparativism, Translation, and Nation-Building in the Age of Empire” on September 4-6, 2023, in collaboration with the ERC project "Modernizing Empires: Enlightenment, Nationalist Vanguards and Non-Western Literary Modernities" (University of Bologna), together with other European scholars of Japanese and Ottoman studies from institutions in Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
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