Japanese literature | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 23 pages of analysis & critique of Japanese literature.

Japanese literature | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 23 pages of analysis & critique of Japanese literature.
This section contains 6,683 words
(approx. 23 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Van C. Gessel

SOURCE: "Postoccupation Literary Movements and Developments in Japan," in Legacies and Ambiguities: Postwar Fiction and Culture in Germany and Japan, edited by Ernestine Schlant and J. Thomas Rimer, The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1991, pp. 207-23.

In the following essay, Gessel discusses major fiction writers and literary movements that emerged in Japan after World War II.

Japanese fiction after the occupation is in many ways an extension as well as a rethinking of the two major types of writing that dominated prewar composition—specifically, the works by the socially and ideologically committed proletarian authors (Puroretaria bungaku sakka) and the predominantly asocial, semiautobiographical personal narratives (the infamous shi-shosetsu). There was little cross-pollenization between these two rival factions; the proletarian writers considered the shi-shosetsu writers to be needlessly parochial, overweeningly narcissistic, and dangerously removed from the political and social concerns that were already tearing apart the fabric of experimental democracy in...

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This section contains 6,683 words
(approx. 23 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Van C. Gessel
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