Ever since the first modern histories of Japanese literature were published in the late nineteenth century, “Japanese literature” has been conceived, developed, and questioned in relationship to the notions of “world literature.” Suzuki rethinks the literary culture of modern Japan in relationship to the shifting landscape of literary historiography and national language policy.

Tomi Suzuki is Professor of Japanese literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. She is a specialist of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Japanese literature in comparative perspective. Her major publications include Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity (Stanford University Press, 1996); Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature (author and co-editor, Stanford University Press, 2001); and the Cambridge History of Japanese Literature (author and co-editor, Cambridge University Press, 2016).