The Textual Townsman: Writing Urban Identity in Early Modern Japan

In this innovative and interdisciplinary book, Thomas Gaubatz offers a fresh approach to understanding the literature of the Tokugawa townspeople. Ranging across history, literature, and print culture—including richly contextualized close readings of the works of Ihara Saikaku and Ejima Kiseki—he shows that popular fiction made sense of the urban world by modeling how individuals could refashion themselves through the performance of shared norms. Challenging the assumption that townsman literature was a voice of resistance to official ideology and warrior authority, Gaubatz argues that print fiction functioned to articulate new identities, legitimate emerging forms of social power, and symbolically contain the tensions and hierarchies within the urban community—and the contradictions within the townsman self. Through this vision of textual self-fashioning, The Textual Townsman develops a radically new account of the politics of popular fiction in Tokugawa status society.