Garrett L. Washington's Books

Church Space and the Capital in Prewar Japan

By: Garrett L. Washington

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Church Space and the Capital in Prewar Japan

By: Garrett L. Washington

Christians have never constituted one percent of Japan’s population, yet Christianity had a disproportionately large influence on Japan’s social, intellectual, and political development. This happened despite the Tokugawa shogunate’s successful efforts to criminalize Christianity and even after the Meiji government took measures to limit its influence. From journalism and literature, to medicine, education, and politics, the mark of Protestant Japanese is indelible. Herein lies the conundrum that has interested scholars for decades. How did Christianity overcome the ideological legacies of its past in Japan? How did Protestantism distinguish itself from the other options in the religious landscape like Buddhism and New Religions? And how did the religious movement’s social relevance and activism persist despite the government’s measures to weaken the relationship between private religion and secular social life in Japan? In Church Space and the Capital in Prewar Japan, Garrett L. Washington responds to these questions with a spatially explicit study on the influence of the Protestant church in imperial Japan. He examines the physical and social spaces that Tokyo’s largest Japanese-led congregations cultivated between 1879 and 1923 and their broader social ties. These churches developed alongside, and competed with, the locational, architectural, and social spaces of Buddhism, Shinto, and New Religions. Their success depended on their pastors’ decisions about location and relocation, those men’s conceptualizations of the new imperial capital and aspirations for Japan, and the Western-style buildings they commissioned. Japanese pastors and laypersons grappled with Christianity’s relationships to national identity, political ideology, women’s rights, Japanese imperialism, and modernity; church-based group activities aimed to raise social awareness and improve society. Further, it was largely through attendees’ externalized ideals and networks developed at church but expressed in their public lives outside the church that Protestant Christianity exerted such a visible influence on modern Japanese society. Church Space offers answers to longstanding questions about Protestant Christianity’s reputation and influence by using a new space-centered perspective to focus on Japanese agency in the religion’s metamorphosis and social impact, adding a fresh narrative of cultural imperialism.

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354

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University of Hawaii Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0824891724

ISBN 13

9780824891725

Episodic Poetics

Politics and Literary Form After the Constitution

By: Matthew Garrett

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Episodic Poetics

Politics and Literary Form After the Constitution

By: Matthew Garrett

The early United States was a culture of the episode. In Episodic Poetics, Matthew Garrett merges narrative theory with social and political history to explain the early American fascination with the episodic, piecemeal plot. Since Aristotle's Poetics, the episode has been a vexed category of literary analysis, troubling any easy view of the subsumption of unwieldy narrative parts into well-plotted wholes. Garrett puts forward a new, dialectical theory of episodic form to recast this peculiar object of literary history, looking to the episode as a narrative unit smaller than the genre in order to give an account of all the period's major prose genres. Garrett shows how, in ways both magisterial and mundane, episodic forms gave variegated shape to the social, political, and economic conflicts that defined the moment of national formation. Episodic Poetics proposes a new method of reading and a new way of conceiving of literary history. The book asks how we might understand the cultural role of the episode as a literary micro-unit, one that forces us to read individual narratives in terms of an always partial and fraught development toward plot. Episodic Poetics combines theoretical reflection and historical rigor with careful readings of texts from the early American canon such as The Federalist, Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, and the novels of Charles Brockden Brown, along with hitherto understudied texts and ephemera such as Washington Irving's Salmagundi, Susanna Rowson's Trials of the Human Heart and the memoirs of the metalworker and failed entrepreneur John Fitch. Garrett recounts literary history not as the easy victory of grand nationalist ambitions, but rather as a series of social struggles expressed through writers' recurring engagement with incompletely integrated forms.

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257

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Oxford University Press, USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0199346534

ISBN 13

9780199346530

Church Space and the Capital in Prewar Japan

By: Garrett L. Washington

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Church Space and the Capital in Prewar Japan

By: Garrett L. Washington

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

354

Publisher

University of Hawaii Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0824891724

ISBN 13

9780824891725

Book's by Garrett L. Washington

Church Space and the Capital in Prewar Japan

Church Space and the Capital in Prewar Japan

Episodic Poetics

Episodic Poetics

Church Space and the Capital in Prewar Japan

Church Space and the Capital in Prewar Japan

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