Free Open-Access E-Book Editions of Two Edited Volumes
I’m delighted that University of Michigan Press has just made two books I edited available in free open-access e-book editions. This was made possible by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program.
The first one is the English translation of Kamei’s Hideo‘s Transformations of Sensibility: The Phenomenology of Meiji Literature(??????????????????). The work was first serialized in Gunzo in 1978-9, then published in book form in 1983, and our translation first came out in 2002. The English translation includes new introductions by Kamei and me, situating the unique approach he takes to literary analysis in the book against its historical situation. You can download the open-access e-book version here.
The second one is The Linguistic Turn in Contemporary Japanese Literary Studies, which first appeared in 2010. It includes translations of classic essays by Kamei, Mitani Kuniaki, Noguchi Takehiko, and Hirata Yumi, plus new scholarly essays by Joseph Essertier, KONO Kensuke, Norma Field, Richi Sakakibara, John Whitman, Leslie Winston, and Guohe Zheng. In my introduction to the volume, I sketch in the history of linguistics-based approaches in Japanese literary scholarship, using the 1980s “Kokoro ronso” as an entryway. You can download the open-access e-book version here.
