Language, nation, race : linguistic reform in Meiji Japan (1868-1912) /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	Ueda, Atsuko, author.
Imprint:	Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2021]
Description:	x, 158 pages ; 23 cm
Language:	English
Series:	New interventions in Japanese studies ; 1 New interventions in Japanese studies ; 1.
Subject:	Japanese language -- Reform -- Meiji period, 1868-1912. Language policy -- Japan -- Meiji period, 1868-1912. Nationalism -- Japan -- Meiji period, 1868-1912. Race relations. Japan -- Race relations -- Meiji period, 1868-1912. Japan.
Format:	Print Book
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/12578106

Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:	9780520381711 0520381718 9780520381728
Notes:	Includes bibliographical references (pages 145-154) and index.
Summary:	"Language, Nation, Race explores the various language reforms at the onset of Japanese modernity, a time when "national language" (kokugo) was produced in order to standardize the Japanese language. Faced with the threat of Western colonialism, Meiji intellectuals proposed various reforms to standardize the Japanese language in order to quickly educate the illiterate masses with the new forms of Western knowledge. This book liberates these language reforms from the predetermined category of the "nation," for such a notion had yet to exist as a clear telos to which the reforms aspired. Atsuko Ueda draws on, while critically intervening in, the vast scholarship of language reform that arose in the 1990s and that engaged with numerous works of postcolonial and cultural studies. She examines the first two decades of the Meiji period, with specific focus on the issue of race, contending that no analysis of imperialism or nationalism is possible without it"--
Other form:	Online version: Ueda, Atsuko Language, nation, race Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2021] 9780520381728

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. "Pre-Nation": Linguistic Chaos
1. Competing "Languages": "Sound" in the Orthographic Reforms of Early Meiji Japan
2. Sound, Scripts, and Styles: Kanbun kundokutai and the National Language Reforms of 1880s Japan
3. Zoku as Aesthetic Criterion: Reforms for Poetry and Prose
Part II. Race and Language Reform
4. Racializing the National Language: Ueda Kazutoshi's Kokugo Reform
5. Tropes of Racialization in the Works of Natsume Soseki
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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