The Textual Townsman - by Thomas Gaubatz

About the Book

In this innovative and interdisciplinary book, Thomas Gaubatz offers a fresh approach to understanding the literature of the Tokugawa townspeople.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

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.--David L. Howell, author of Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan

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.--Anne Walthall, University of California, Irvine

About the Author

Thomas Gaubatz is assistant professor of Japanese literature and culture at Northwestern University.