{"product_id":"the-hirabayashi-hatsunosuke-reader-mass-culture-and-intermediality-in-imperial-japan-9781350378155","title":"The Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke Reader: Mass Culture and Intermediality in Imperial Japan","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eThis edited volume assembles a wide array of writings by Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke, one of 20th-century Japan's foremost intellectuals, translated for the first time into English. \u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIt begins with an introduction by the editors, Seth Jacobowitz and Aaron William Moore, that contextualizes Hirabayashi's significance as a non-doctrinaire Marxist cultural critic, visionary thinker, and much-beloved popular fiction writer. The 'Short Stories', features a selection of Hirabayashi's literary work, including science fiction ('The Artificial Human'), detective fiction ('This is How I Died!'), and more idiosyncratic works such as 'Demon at the Pulpit', an antitheist and anticlerical story. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThe 'Essays' provides a range of groundbreaking critical and theoretical tracts that address such topics as 'The Social Basis of Modernism', 'The Feminisation of Culture', 'Political Value and Artistic Value: A Re-Appraisal of Marxist Literary Theory', 'Film as a Mechanism of Americanization', 'The Technological Revolution in Literature and the Arts', and many more. Hirabayashi's systematic approach to cultural theory befitting the era of massification in the 1920s places him front and centre in the hothouse intellectual climate of pre-war Japan. It also affords striking parallels to the leading thinkers in Europe such as Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci, thereby forming an integral part of the history of global modernity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eSeth Jacobowitz \u003c\/b\u003eis Assistant Professor of Japanese in the Department of World Languages \u0026amp; Literatures at Texas State University, USA. He is the author of \u003ci\u003eWriting Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture\u003c\/i\u003e (2016), which won the International Convention of Asia Scholars Book Prize in the Humanities in 2017. He is the translator from Japanese of \u003ci\u003eThe Edogawa Rampo Reader\u003c\/i\u003e (2008) and from Portuguese of Fernando Morais' \u003ci\u003eDirty Hearts: The History of Shindo Renmei\u003c\/i\u003e (2021). \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cb\u003eAaron William Moore\u003c\/b\u003e is Handa Chair of Japanese-Chinese Relations at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He is the author of many articles on Chinese and Japanese wartime childhood and youth, as well as two books: \u003ci\u003eWriting War\u003c\/i\u003e (2013), which analysed over 200 combat soldiers' diaries from China, Japan, and the United States, and \u003ci\u003eBombing the City \u003c\/i\u003e(2018), which compared the air raid experiences of civilians in British and Japanese regional cities.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Bloomsbury Academic","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51648758055186,"sku":"9781350378155","price":126.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_e38b7985-2f84-4c43-ba3c-7d36bc54c4bb.jpg?v=1759833624","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/the-hirabayashi-hatsunosuke-reader-mass-culture-and-intermediality-in-imperial-japan-9781350378155","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}