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Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature. Edited by HARUO SHIRANE and TOMI SUZUKI. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. xiii, 333 pp. $60.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).
The objective of this collection of essays, as Haruo Shirane announces in his cogent introduction, is to historicize the complex sociopolitical process of canon formation, particularly as it relates to the emergence of linguistic and cultural nationalism. To this end, the essays explore the history of scholarly reception of texts that have been established as classics, as repositories of the Japanese tradition, with an emphasis on the modern invention of national identities.
The collection presents a truly significant contribution to the study of Japanese literature, by calling attention to the impact of modernity on readings of classical texts, and by raising questions about the neutrality of received scholarship. All the essays are solidly researched and lucidly written, and the volume is certain to be widely used and cited. Given the importance of this collection, it is crucial to look at the central issues raised in it.
Across the essays are general indications that "literature" is a object produced by institutions and discourses of modernization that also generated "Japan." Literature is national literature, and to construct a literary canon is to construct a national identity-which Shirane highlights both in his introduction and in his essay on how institutions of education shaped the Japanese canon. And as a whole, the essays focus attention on the profound changes in textual interpretation that arose with the formation and consolidation of national literature in the Meiji and Taisho periods.
Shinada Yoshikazu, for instance, discusses how scholars in the Meiji period, in their search for a national lyric with qualities like those extolled in Western literary histories, made a national poetry anthology of Man'yoshu. Of particular importance was the notion that Man'yoshu presented a unified nation that extended from emperor to commoners. Later in the Meiji period, there occurred a second transformation that called attention to the popular or folk elements, and invented min'yo or "folk song." The two interpretations coexisted in the prewar period, but only the second survived the postwar reduction of the emperor to a symbolic status, precisely because it was articulated in cultural rather than political terms.
Konoshi Takamitsu...