Natsume Sōseki, Intellectual Networking and the Founding of the Publisher Iwanami Shoten in Prewar Japan
Sheehan, Brett
University of Southern California
2020
444
Ph.D.
University of Southern California
2020
The present work is a study of the Japanese publisher Iwanami Shoten, which since its emergence in the mid-1910s has consistently held a unique and defining position in Japanese intellectual culture: it has functioned as a center of much networking among intellectuals, a leading force behind intellectual movements, and a symbol of education and cultural sophistication. Moreover, it contributed to forming public personas for many intellectuals, and broadened the reach of those intellectuals through marketing their works in a canon of "modern classics." The cultural complex formed by intellectuals, publications, and the public, has come to be understood by Japanese cultural critics as comprising an "Iwanami culture."