Rethinking Japanese Resistance to Global Capitalist Modernity - Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan: Childhood, Korea, and the Historical Avant-Garde. By Samuel Perry. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. xii, 228 pp. ISBN: 9780824875190 (paper, also available in cloth and as e-book). - Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan. By James Mark Shields. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. x, 404 pp. ISBN: 9780190664008 (cloth, also available as e-book). - The Sublime

Abstract

qualifying counter-arguments to this statement, I find the simple truth it presents with one broad stroke very stimulating. Pigeot's work is full of such moments. Finally, the fact that two of the six books presented here are works of reception history is significant. Although both Emmerich and Mostow are uncomfortable with the passive connotations of the word "reception," Emmerich preferring "replacement" and Mostow preferring "appropriation," both works still draw their inspiration from viewing a text not as something fixed but as an event that happens in the act of reading and changes over time. Note that this is also the point of departure for Washburn's translation. Given the large number of reception histories that have emanated in particular from Columbia University, 4 one can say this appears to have become a dominant line of inquiry in premodern Japanese literary studies. While Pigeot's work reminds us of the need to reach general audiences, all these works bear witness to the vital importance of translation for this field and to the contribution literary theory has made in deepening our perception of Heian literature.