Lecture
Ōtsuka Kusuoko (1875-1910) in the Meiji Literary Field: Models of Authorship between keishū sakka and the "New Woman"
- Pau Pitarch Fernandez (Waseda University)
- Date
- Thursday 6 March 2025
- Time
- Serie
- Leiden Lecture Series in Japanese Studies
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.30
If Ōtsuka Kusuoko (1875-1910) appears at all in the mainstream narrative of modern Japanese Literary History, she is generally remembered as the author of the anti-war poem “O-hyakudo mōde” (1905). She was also a prolific author of fiction, however, both celebrated as an “Ichiyō for the present age” and criticized as “offensive” or even “disgusting” for the unconventional moral choices of her heroines.
In this lecture, I will discuss how Ōtsuka attempted to configure a new authorial model for herself, as an upper-class writer of serialized melodrama. Even if she was ultimately unsuccessful, tracing this effort in her own writings, as well as in the advertising for her works and the critical discourse they sparked, is useful to understand the spaces the Meiji literary field afforded women writers and what was restricted from them, between the media-created keishū sakka ideal of the 1890s and the “New Woman” generation of the 1910s.
About the speaker
Pau Pitarch Fernandez is Associate Professor of Modern Japanese Literature at the Waseda University School of Culture, Media and Society. His research examines how interactions between literature, psychology, and publishing culture configured a new concept of authorship and artistic value, as fiction writing became professionalized in early twentieth-century Japan. Other interests include history of science, the economics of culture, and mystery, science fiction, and horror as global genres.