The Typographic Imagination : : Reading and Writing in Japan’s Age of Modern Print Media / / Nathan Shockey.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Columbia University Press Complete eBook-Package 2019
• VerfasserIn: Shockey, Nathan,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Columbia University Press, , [2019]; ©2019
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Series: Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

In the early twentieth century, Japan was awash with typographic text and mass-produced print. Over the short span of a few decades, affordable books and magazines became a part of everyday life, and a new generation of writers and thinkers considered how their world could be reconstructed through the circulation of printed language as a mass-market commodity. The Typographic Imagination explores how this commercial print revolution transformed Japan’s media ecology and traces the possibilities and pitfalls of type as a force for radical social change.Nathan Shockey examines the emergence of new forms of reading, writing, and thinking in Japan from the last years of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth. Charting the relationships among prose, politics, and print capitalism, he considers the meanings and functions of print as a staple commodity and as a ubiquitous and material medium for discourse and thought. Drawing on extensive archival research, The Typographic Imagination brings into conversation a wide array of materials, including bookseller trade circulars, language reform debates, works of experimental fiction, photo gazetteers, socialist periodicals, Esperanto primers, declassified censorship documents, and printing press strike bulletins. Combining the rigorous close analysis of Japanese literary studies with transdisciplinary methodologies from media studies, book history, and intellectual history, The Typographic Imagination presents a multivalent vision of the rise of mass print media and the transformations of modern Japanese literature, language, and culture.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- A NOTE ON ROMANIZATION AND TRANSLATION -- Introduction: The World Made Type -- PART I. The Making of a Modern Media Ecology -- Chapter One. Pictures and Voices from a Paper Empire -- Chapter Two. Iwanami Shoten and the Enterprise of Eternity -- Chapter Three. The Topography of Typography: Bibliophiles and Used Books in the Print City -- PART II. Prose, Language, and Politics in the Type Era -- Chapter Four. New Age Sensations: Yokomitsu Riichi and the Contours of Literary Discourse -- Chapter Five. Brave New Words: Orthographic Reform, Romanization, and Esperantism -- Chapter Six. The Medium Is the Masses: Print Capitalism and the Prewar Leftist Movement -- Conclusion: Ends, Echoes, and Inversions -- NOTES -- SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX