Not yet released - Shipping date approx. 09 Dec 2025
66 ELITE Points earned with this purchase! Earn 250 for a $10 Reward!
Not an ELITE Member? Join ELITE here
In the bustling cities of late seventeenth-century Japan, a new urban landscape was emerging, marked by diversity and dynamism. As individuals from various backgrounds converged, traditional social bonds evolved into expansive urban identities, inextricably linked to the rise of woodblock-printed texts. This confluence of social, spatial, and textual elements gave rise to a distinct social figure: the Tokugawa townsman.
Thomas Gaubatz presents an innovative exploration of Tokugawa townspeople’s literature. Through historical context, literary analysis, and print culture insights, including close readings of Ihara Saikaku and Ejima Kiseki, he reveals how popular fiction shaped the urban experience. It modeled how individuals could reinvent themselves through shared social norms.
Challenging the notion of townsman literature as mere resistance against authority, Gaubatz argues that print fiction articulated new identities, legitimized emerging social power, and symbolically managed the tensions within the urban community and the contradictions within the townsman self. This vision of textual self-fashioning offers a new understanding of the politics of popular fiction in Tokugawa society.
Title: The Textual Townsman : Writing Urban Identity In Early Modern Japan
Format: Paperback Book
Release Date: 09 Dec 2025
Type: Thomas Gaubatz
Sku: 3534777
Catalogue No: 9780231221313
Category: Teaching
![]() |
Help you find exactly what you are looking for, even if you aren't sure yourself! |
![]() |
Track down the hard to find as quickly as possible - if it's available, we will get it! |
![]() |
Deliver fast and friendly service to every customer. |
![]() |
Provide you with the hottest, the latest and a great range. |
![]() |
And if you're not satisified, you can exchange or with a receipt, get your money back - no questions asked! |