Two-Timing Modernity: Homosocial Narrative in Modern Japanese Fiction

J. Keith Vincent

ISBN 10: 0674067126 / ISBN 13: 9780674067127

Published by Harvard University, Asia Center, 2012

About this Item

Two-Timing Modernity integrates queer, feminist, and narratological approaches to show how key works by Japanese male authors in the early twentieth century encompassed both a straight future and a queer past by staging tensions between Japan's newly heteronormative culture and the recent memory of a male homosocial past now read as perverse. Series: Harvard East Asian Monographs. Num Pages: 248 pages. BIC Classification: 2GJ; DSBH; DSK. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 229 x 152 x 25. Weight in Grams: 499. . 2012. First Edition. Hardcover. . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland.

Seller Inventory # V9780674067127

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Two-Timing Modernity: Homosocial Narrative in Modern Japanese Fiction
• Publisher: Harvard University, Asia Center
• Publication Date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674067126
• ISBN 13: 9780674067127
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Until the late nineteenth century, Japan could boast of an elaborate cultural tradition surrounding the love and desire that men felt for other men. By the first years of the twentieth century, however, as heterosexuality became associated with an enlightened modernity, love between men was increasingly branded as “feudal” or immature. The resulting rupture in what has been called the “male homosocial continuum” constitutes one of the most significant markers of Japan’s entrance into modernity. And yet, just as early Japanese modernity often seemed haunted by remnants of the premodern past, the nation’s newly heteronormative culture was unable and perhaps unwilling to expunge completely the recent memory of a male homosocial past now read as perverse.

Two-Timing Modernity integrates queer, feminist, and narratological approaches to show how key works by Japanese male authors―Mori Ōgai, Natsume Sōseki, Hamao Shirō, and Mishima Yukio―encompassed both a straight future and a queer past by employing new narrative techniques to stage tensions between two forms of temporality: the forward-looking time of modernization and normative development, and the “perverse” time of nostalgia, recursion, and repetition.

About the Author

J. Keith Vincent is Assistant Professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature at Boston University.