Edo-period Japan was a golden age for commercial fiction. But how to understand the politics of this literature remains contested, in part because many of its defining characteristics—formulaicness, reuse of narratives, stock characters, linguistic play, and heavy allusion to literary canon—can seem to hold social and political realities at arm’s length. Writing Violence: The Politics of Form in Early Modern Japanese Literature offers a new approach to understanding the relationship between the challenging formal features of early modern fiction and the world beyond its pages. Focusing on depictions of violence, Atherton shows how the formal dimensions of early modern literature had the potential to alter the perception of time and space, make social and economic forces visible, defamiliarize conventions, give voice to the socially peripheral, and reshape the contours of community. Writing Violence reveals the essential role of literary form in constructing the world—and in seeing it anew.

David C. Atherton is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. His work focuses on the literature of early modern Japan (ca. 1600-1868), and he has published on commercial authorship, the representation of violence, and the dynamics of early modern literary form. His book Writing Violence: The Politics of Form in Early Modern Japanese Literature was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2024. He is currently writing a book that explores early modern authorship through the experimental, self-referential late works of Ueda Akinari (1734-1809).