© Columbia University Press
The Dawn That Never Comes: Shimazaki Toson and Japanese Nationalism
September, 2003
Cloth, 312 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-12980-0
$59.50
/ £41.00
"a strikingly original work of remarkable erudition that is also a rigorous theoretical practice...a book that speaks widely to literary and cultural critics and is also a must read for scholars of nationalism and Japanese modernity." — James A. Fujii, The Journal of Asian Studies
"Bourdaghs's study offers a fascinating interpretation of the major novels of an understudied but enormously interesting literary figure." — Chia-Ning Chang, Monumenta Nipponica
"His insightful and informative book has deepened our understanding of a highly influential but sadly still neglected Japanese writer....That said, Bourdaghs has certainly opened my eyes to ways of reading Toson I had not considered before, and he is to be thanked for that." — Stephen Dodd, Journal of Japanese StudiesSOAS, University of London
"In its originality and theoretical sophistication it revolutionizes both the study of Toson and the study of Japanese nationalism." — Janet A. Walker, Harvard Journal of Asiatic StudiesRutgers University
"On the surface, The Dawn that Never Comes is a long-needed critical study of Shimazaki Toson, one of the most important writers of the Meiji Period. But it is much more; using the idea of a national imagination this sophisticated account reminds us of the centrality and utility of literary texts in the imbrication of the nation. Each chapter is like a biography of a novel, but by describing the historical milieu of their creation, as well as subsequent interpretations, Bourdaghs demonstrates the role of literature in the materiality—body, imperialism, gender, and capitalism—of state power." — Stefan Tanaka, University of California, San Diego
"This embodies a dauntless aspiration to appreciate the intrinsic relationship between social discrimination and the formation of the nation-state. In reading major literary works by Shimazaki Toson, a Japanese novelist of the early twentieth century, Michael Bourdaghs probes into the problem concerning the social and historical contextuality of the literary text and brilliantly describes the working of the national imaginary in the construction of the sense of national communality in modern society. He believes that modern literary texts serve to generate the images of concrete everyday life and, in this sense, should be understood as ideological utterances in which people relate themselves to larger national communities and live national identities. In its attempt to answer why racial, ethnic, and gender discriminations are so integral to the constitution of modern subjectivity, no book has been so successful in synthesizing the most recent Japanese scholarship on modernity and the theoretical insights of U.S. cultural studies." — Naoki Sakai, Cornell University