On Uneven Ground

by Long, Hoyt

• ISBN13: 9780804776868
• ISBN10: 0804776865
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-12-14
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

The history of literary and artistic production in modern Japan has typically centered on the literature and art of Tokyo, yet cultural activity in the country's regional cities and rural towns was no less vibrant. On Uneven Groundrecovers pieces of this neglected history through the figure of Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933). While alive, he remained a mostly unknown and unread provincial author whose experiments with narrative fiction, amateur theater, and farmer's art reveal an intense determination to reimagine and remake his native place, in the northeast of Japan, meaningful. Today, Miyazawa is one of the most recognized figures in Japan's modern literary canon. The story of his radical posthumous rise presents an opportunity to examine the larger history of how writing and other forms of artistic practice have intersected with place-based identity and the uneven geography of cultural production. The first book-length study of Miyazawa in English, On Uneven Groundcenters on Miyazawa's life and writing to recreate a sense of what it was to write about and remake place from a spatially marginal position in the cultural field.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
A Note on Naming	p. ix
Prologue: Making Place for the Author	p. 1
Thinking the Local
Finding Value in Locality	p. 17
Decentering the Uneven Geography of Cultural Production	p. 35
The Marginal Case and the Texture of Locality
Toward a Provincializing Literary Production	p. 55
Making Space for a New Literary Region	p. 79
Conversations with Nature	p. 103
The New Roles of Local Engagement
Performing the Village Square	p. 133
Farmers' Art in an Age of Cosmopolitan Agrarianism	p. 159
Epilogue: Trading Places	p. 193
Notes	p. 209
Bibliography	p. 271
Index	p. 287
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.