Robert Tuck is assistant professor of Japanese at the University of Montana. He has published in Review of Japanese Culture and Society, Sino-Japanese Studies, and Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. This would be his first book.Robert Tuck is assistant professor of modern Japanese literature and culture at Arizona State University.

Matthew Fraleigh, Brandeis University:
This is an important book that is impressive in its scope, thorough in its research, and very timely. Idly Scribbling Rhymers provides us with a fresh view of the Meiji poetic scene that is both richly detailed and broadly based. Tuck takes readers on a deeply rewarding tour of areas that are all but unknown in Anglophone scholarship.

Wiebke Denecke, Boston University:
Against the well-worn narratives of political instrumentalization or aesthetic innovation, Tuck impresses with a powerful alternative literary history of how poets made Japanese modernity: a riveting story about the virulent anxieties over class distinction, political commentary, new media, and gender identity in Japan’s emerging empire. Richly documented, cleverly argued, and boldly inquisitive, Idly Scribbling Rhymers is an exemplary study of how traditional genres morph under the pressures of modernization.

David B. Lurie, Columbia University:
Were it simply a high-quality study of Masaoka Shiki, Idly Scribbling Rhymers would still reward careful reading, but it is much more: Tuck provides a broad picture of the fate of all traditional poetic forms in the Meiji period. His erudite and insightful attention to kanshi, valuable on its own, also reveals new aspects of haiku and waka, and he breaks fresh ground with his examination of poetry’s role in the emerging medium of the newspaper.