The typographic imagination : reading and writing in Japan's age of modern print media /
Nathan Shockey.
- New York : Columbia University Press, (c)2020.
- 1 online resource (xi, 314 pages) : illustrations.
- Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University .
Includes bibliographies and index.
Introduction: The world made type -- Part I: The making of a modern media ecology -- Pictures and voices from a paper empire -- Iwanami Shoten and the enterprise of eternity -- The topography of typography: bibliophiles and used books in the print city -- Part II: Prose, language, and politics in Japan's type era -- Sensational age: Yokomitsu Riichi and the contours of literary discourse -- Brave new words: orthographic reform, romanization, and esperantism -- The medium is the masses: print capitalism and the prewar leftist movement -- Conclusion: ends, echoes, and inversions.
"A study of how Japan's modern commercial print revolution transformed ideas and practices of prose, language, philosophy, and politics. The book explores the habituation of new forms of reading and writing from the last years of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth, as the publishing industry made mass-produced books and magazines an inexorable part of everyday life. The book argues that this process precipitated a consciousness of the typographic text as a material medium and economic artifice with the power to critique and remake the modern world. Drawing from extensive archival research, with materials ranging from Meiji-era magazines to bookseller trade journals, strike bulletins, Esperanto primers, and declassified secret government censorship reports, The Typographic Imagination provides a layered, prismatic vision of Japanese literature, language, and culture in the age of modern mass media"--
9780231550741
2019981086
Book industries and trade--History--Japan--19th century. Book industries and trade--History--Japan--20th century. Printing--History--Japan--19th century. Printing--History--Japan--20th century. Books and reading--History--Japan--19th century. Books and reading--History--Japan--20th century.