Modern Japanese Writers

From Booklist
The latest addition to the Scribner Writers Series is the first volume in the series to concentrate on Asian literature. This handbook is a collection of alphabetically arranged articles on 23 twentieth-century Japanese writers and one literary genre, written by noted scholars in the field.Entries are generally around 18 pages in length. Each author entry treats a writer's life and work and is accompanied by a selected bibliography of primary and secondary sources. Most of the writers included have been translated into English, and two of them, Kawabata Yasunari and Oe Kenzaburo, are Nobel Prize winners. One of the most interesting articles is the one on "Atomic Bomb Writers," a survey of the literary genre that represents Japanese writers' responses to the effects and aftereffects of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.As high-school and college literature curricula expand to cover more writers outside the traditional Western canon, this will be a valuable resource in collections supporting those programs. Libraries owning Japanese Fiction Writers Since World War II and Japanese Fiction Writers, 1868-1945 (both 1997), from Gale's Dictionary of Literary Biography series, will find that the Scribner volume adds only five writers. However, the Scribner reference lists are more extensive, and the essays are generally different enough to warrant purchase. RBB
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Scholars of Japanese literature from a number of prestigious US universities present 24 essays profiling as many writers, among them Novel-Prize winners Kawabata Yasunari and Oe Kenzaburo; and Murakami Haruki, whose work has touched on Japanese youth in the closing decades of the 20th century. Almost all of them have been translated extensively into English. No standard format was imposed on the contributors, but many of them provide necessary background and an overview of the writer's significance in appropriate contexts. The treatment should be of interest to readers ranging from high school students to advanced researchers. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)


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