Elizabeth Oyler's recent co-edited volume Cultural Imprints (Cornell University Press, 2022) draws on literary works, artifacts, performing arts, and documents that were created by or about the samurai to examine individual "imprints," traces holding specifically grounded historical meanings that persist through time.
In Imperial-Time-Order (Brill 2016), Kun Qian offers a critical study on a persistent historical way of thinking in modern China, centered on notions of time, morality, and empire.
Charles Exley’s recent book, Satō Haruo and Modern Japanese Literature (Brill, 2017) offers the first comprehensive examination of Satō’s literary oeuvre from the 1910s through the 1930s. The study examines the ways in which he interacted with cultural discourses of the time, such as the fantastic and mental illness.
Charles Exley published this year another book co-edited with Michael Stone Tangeman, Old Crimes, New Scenes: A Century of Innovations in Japanese Mystery Fiction fom MerwinAsia. This volume highlights some of Japan’s most creative responses to the mystery genre. Some of the works are innovative because they were written by authors (or, in one case, a poet) who did not normally write mysteries. Others are innovative for their variations on standard elements detective fiction, or for using mystery tropes to interrogate social norms such as social standing, or gender roles. Some works play on technological innovations as keys to the mystery. Some of the works are meta-fictive explorations of the mystery, using detective fiction to investigate detective fiction. Scholars, students and mystery readers alike will find this volume full of surprises.
Digital Initiative
Statistical treatments of information have been a regular way to find significant patterns, especially in SLA research. More recently, we also began using large corpus data to aid research in historical and literary studies.