The first decades of the 20th century saw the radical transformation of the ways in which literary media was produced and consumed in Japan. A new mass readership and a widening market for all manner of typographic print formed a rapidly changing ground upon which writers and critics reassessed how, why, and for whom they created works of literature and social thought. This dissertation examines a selection of fictional and critical texts from the turn of the century through the 1930s to demonstrate how mass-produced typographic media both served to produce mass consumer society in this period and functioned as sites for its critique, extending the aesthetic, linguistic, and political horizons of modern Japanese social life. I contend that an engagement with the commodity character of printed text enabled authors to develop experimental practices of writing that problematized the nexus of mutual interactions between printed text, visual media, urban space, and the human body. Chapter 1 traces the rise of magazines and affordable books through the late 1920s to show how new forms of print media served as forums for the dissemination and discussion of alternative models of literary practice and social organization. In Chapter 2, I examine the journal Bungei Jidai (Literary Age, 1924-1927) to explore how a generation of authors born into the age of mass-market print established literary networks, evaluated existing paradigms of reading, and experimented with new forms of writing. In the third chapter, I examine an array of fictional texts, sociological studies, schemas of urban planning, and other representations of modern city life in order to analyze how authors and critics understood the mutual mediations between municipal space, the printed text, and the human body in this period. Finally, in Chapter 4, I identify a shift in the understanding of printed language concurrent with the changes to urban and discursive space that I discuss in the previous chapters. I follow discussions of language reform policies, literary formalism, the economics of the publishing industry, and the project of proletarian literature in the late 1920s in order to demonstrate the emergence of a sense of "literary materialism" precipitated by the proliferation of typographic text. In a brief conclusion, I address the importance of this crucial period for understanding the present shift from print to digital text.

The Edo period (1600-1867) was an era of revenge, both in lived reality and on the printed page. During the Edo period, revenge for the murder of a senior family member was considered a virtuous act of filial piety, and, following certain bureaucratic protocols, it was legal for junior family members to pursue a lethal vendetta (katakiuchi) against the murderer. Over one hundred successful vendettas were carried out over the nearly 270 years of Tokugawa rule, events which formed the ground for a vast number of semi-fictional retellings and purely fictional works, many of them penned by some of the period's most famous authors. As an act of virtuous violence, charged with meanings that were deeply entwined with the fundamental values of early modern Japanese moral ideology, vendetta constitutes a unique point of access to the early modern moral imagination. I argue that this unique status enabled the literary topos of vendetta to speak powerfully to the desires and anxieties of early modern readers, constituting a site in which the demands of social obligation, the power of social norms and discourses, the moral relations of class and gender difference, and the ideologies that ordered visions of community and human relationships could be examined, affirmed, re-imagined, challenged, and critiqued, through the complex representational possibilities of literary art. Adopting a comparative approach that places texts, authors, and historical moments in dialogue and that emphasizes the involvement of these works in their broader sociocultural contexts, I explore the work performed by one of the most vital literary topoi of early modern Japan. I begin in Chapter One by situating the vendetta fiction of the Edo period within a broader literary and discursive trajectory by identifying patterns in the formation of the vendetta topos across works that predate the founding of the Tokugawa shogunate. Exploring the ways these earlier texts imagine the figures of avenger and enemy and the status of virtuous violence, I argue that vendetta has always been characterized as possessing a disruptive potential that can unsettle orders of authority and social hierarchies, and challenge figures of power and status. In Chapter Two, I consider the early modern legacy of this critical potential by examining popular vendetta fiction's representation of the fundamental social relationships--with the household, status community, and ruling authority--that governed the constitution of selfhood in Edo Japan. Through the liminal figure of the avenger, as a character whose pursuit of vengeance affirms those relationships while temporarily loosing him from their bonds and protections, I demonstrate the ways revenge fiction re-imagined and critiqued the individual's relationship with these primary communities. In Chapter Three, I demonstrate that this critical potential of the vendetta topos could also be turned to explore and expose even moral aspects of early modern society not closely connected to revenge. By examining the ways the late 17th century author Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693) uses the frame of vendetta to invert and challenge the anxieties that attended lower-class working women in contemporary discourse, I show that vendetta fiction could be a powerful site for wrestling with the moral and social contradictions wrought by the changes of a modernizing urban economy. Finally, in Chapter Four I argue that the critical potential of vendetta fiction operates not in spite of, but through the literary conventions that coalesce into formulaic elements during the vendetta literature boom at the turn of the 19th century. Drawing on theories of melodrama to explore the ethical-aesthetic mode that dominates the representation of revenge in these texts, I argue that they expose the contradictions and repressions inherent in the virtues the shogunate was actively propagating in a bid to bolster its moral and political authority as part of the Kansei Reforms of 1787-1793. Throughout these chapters I seek to show the ways in which a body of popular texts that has been largely overlooked as bloodthirsty and formulaic was a critical, active agent in constituting the ways early modern authors and readers imagined and sought to understand their world.

Abstract of thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Iowa, 1923. / Cover-title. Bibliography: p. 20-22.

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This paper explores the influences of Vietnamese and Indonesian music in the piano compositions of Claude Debussy. A brief background of Debussy's formative years and of pertinent social trends in Paris at the turn-of-the-century is provided. This paper then looks at two specific musical events that affected the way Debussy composed for the piano: the Javanese and Annamite exhibits at the Exposition Universelles de 1889 and 1900 in Paris. The musical styles and timbres of these two countries are explored, backed up by accounts of what Debussy actually experienced at the Expositions. Following a look at specific musical effects used by Debussy that reveal the influence of the Orient, this paper surveys an extensive body of his piano music chronologically, focusing on compositional techniques that were learned from the Asian ensembles at the cultural exhibits of the Paris Expositions. This paper reveals the depth of the Oriental influence in Debussy's piano music.

This dissertation explores the Bhaktamāl and its subsequent tradition. Nābhādās' late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century collection of hagiographies praises the qualities of hundreds of devotees and thereby sets the boundaries of a devotional community that far exceeds the sectarian context in which its author wrote. By closely considering the Bhaktamāl, its commentaries, manuscripts, and print editions, this thesis traces crucial aspects of the development of modern Hinduism from the early seventeenth century until the beginning of the twentieth. Priyādās completed the first major commentary on the Bhaktamāl in 1712, approximately a century after Nābhādās composed his garland. Priyādās presents a conception of the Vaishnava community that differs significantly from Nābhādās'. After Priyādās, the Bhaktamāl tradition continued to develop through a thriving manuscript culture, and the Bhaktamāl became a popular text. During the nineteenth century, the Bhaktamāl shaped British understandings of Indian society and played a central role in traditionalist articulations of modern Hinduism. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the concerted efforts of "Sītārāmśaraṇ" Bhagvān Prasād "Rūpkalā" and George Abraham Grierson helped to create a sense of fixity within the Bhaktamāl tradition. Since the time of its composition, the Bhaktamāl has remained a prominent locus of dispute over the boundaries and logic of the broad-based devotional community that we now know as Hinduism.

This dissertation considers how the literatus entrepreneur Li Yu (1610-1680) took advantage of the burgeoning market economy of early Qing China to engineer and market a new experience of the everyday. The world in which Li Yu's cultural products were best sellers was rife with novelty. The Ming dynasty had collapsed in 1644, yet many of its defining features remained: urban centers brimmed with gadgets, both Chinese and foreign, that offered new possibilities for engaging the material world. The status of writing and the reading public was also changing, as more books were published at lower costs than ever before. Li Yu capitalized on this ripe moment to develop and sell cultural products that directed the focus of consumers to the details and possibilities of their everyday. I argue that through his cultural production, Li Yu changed what constituted cultural capital and who had rights to it in the urban centers of southern China in the early Qing. Li Yu made a brand of his name, which he used to market his fiction and drama as well as intangible products like innovative designs and do-it-yourself technologies. I examine the strategies that traverse the range of his cultural production to demonstrate how he altered the physical makeup of the built environment and the visual experience of theatrical performance, while also revising the ways that they could be represented in language and depicted in narrative. Readers of Li Yu's writing, visitors to his gardens, and audiences for his theatrical productions could expect to encounter particulars: his language zooms in on the material world, narrating the gritty specifics of genitals and dirt; he waxes technical about his rigged stage lighting and dioramic windows. In one of his stories, a man uses a telescope to impersonate a god; in another a wily thief cannot "see" a woman's myopia, and so misjudges her. At the heart of this study is Li Yu's magnum opus, Leisure Notes (Xianqing ouji), a curious collection of several hundred essays on topics that range from theater direction to heating, choosing a concubine to balustrade design, the art of walking to pomegranate trees. This text has some commonalities with late-Ming manuals of taste, which documented the fine points of distinction around which people negotiated their status vis-à-vis conspicuous consumption of luxury commodities. In the late Ming, these markers of social distinction were hotly debated as merchants challenged literati claims to rights over cultural capital. I show how Li Yu departs from late-Ming discourse by rejecting luxury commodities to locate discernment instead in readers who join him in experimenting with his reproducible designs and technological improvements in the spaces of their everyday lives. I contend that these experiments reveal the limitations of grand narratives of the day--such as Confucian morality, gender norms, fate, and medicine--by exploiting their contingencies, and by elevating the status of individual experience.