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The Textual Townsman
Writing Urban Identity in Early Modern Japan
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2025
About this book
In the late seventeenth century, Japan’s cities were sites of vast diversity and dynamism. Following decades of explosive urbanization, individuals of different occupations and economic strata came to rethink their relationships with other members of the urban community and old modes of local affiliation gave way to newly capacious forms of urban identity. These emergent social imaginaries were inextricably intertwined with the commercial circulation of woodblock-printed texts. This interplay of the social, the spatial, and the textual gave shape to a new social type: the Tokugawa townsman.
In this innovative and interdisciplinary book, Thomas Gaubatz offers a fresh approach to understanding the literature of the Tokugawa townspeople. Ranging across history, literature, and print culture—including richly contextualized close readings of the works of Ihara Saikaku and Ejima Kiseki—he shows that popular fiction made sense of the urban world by modeling how individuals could refashion themselves through the performance of shared norms. Challenging the assumption that townsman literature was a voice of resistance to official ideology and warrior authority, Gaubatz argues that print fiction functioned to articulate new identities, legitimate emerging forms of social power, and symbolically contain the tensions and hierarchies within the urban community—and the contradictions within the townsman self. Through this vision of textual self-fashioning, The Textual Townsman develops a radically new account of the politics of popular fiction in Tokugawa status society.
In this innovative and interdisciplinary book, Thomas Gaubatz offers a fresh approach to understanding the literature of the Tokugawa townspeople. Ranging across history, literature, and print culture—including richly contextualized close readings of the works of Ihara Saikaku and Ejima Kiseki—he shows that popular fiction made sense of the urban world by modeling how individuals could refashion themselves through the performance of shared norms. Challenging the assumption that townsman literature was a voice of resistance to official ideology and warrior authority, Gaubatz argues that print fiction functioned to articulate new identities, legitimate emerging forms of social power, and symbolically contain the tensions and hierarchies within the urban community—and the contradictions within the townsman self. Through this vision of textual self-fashioning, The Textual Townsman develops a radically new account of the politics of popular fiction in Tokugawa status society.
Reviews
The sophisticated and creative analysis of literary texts in The Textual Townsman combines literary criticism with the latest in social history methodologies to situate the figure of the townsman not just in particular wards but in a social imaginary constructed through spatial networks that stretched from city to countryside. Much appreciated is Gaubatz’s refusal to keep one ear cocked for the distant rumble of the Meiji Restoration.
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Meticulously researched and rich with compelling interpretations of late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century urban literature, Thomas Gaubatz’s The Textual Townsman offers new insights into the processes by which printed popular fiction reinvented that most fluid and ambiguous category, the chōnin, or “townsman,” as a sort of habitus grounded in a shared entrepreneurial ethos. The book’s subtle exploration of the dynamic interactions among early modern social, economic, and literary worlds and their performative evocation of townsman selfhood makes it essential reading for anyone interested in Japanese literature and its history.
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The Textual Townsman heralds a bright new age for the study of early modern Japanese literature. Thomas Gaubatz harnesses a deep knowledge of Edo’s urban history to his exemplary skills as a critic and translator to bring key texts and the city they represented to rich, complex life.
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Frontmatter
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CONTENTS
v -
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INTRODUCTION. Writing Urban Identity
1 - PART I Reimagining Urban Community
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Chapter One THE COMMUNITY OF THE MARKETPLACE
49 -
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Chapter Two THE POETICS AND POLITICS OF TOWNSMAN PROPERTY
91 -
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Chapter Three FROM TOWNSMAN CULTURE TO TOWNSMAN NARRATIVE
132 - PART II Copying Characters
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Chapter Four THE MISFORTUNE OF BEING SAVED BY ONE’S ARTS
171 -
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Chapter Five REPRESENTING NORMALITY
213 -
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EPILOGUE. From the Textual Townsman to Edo Urbanism
255 -
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
271 -
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NOTES
277 -
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
303 -
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INDEX
319
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
December 9, 2025
eBook ISBN:
9780231563666
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9780231563666
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
