Ghostly feelings in Meiji and early Taisho literature

This dissertation begins by tracing the diminution of ghosts' status within the limited yet important contexts of storytelling, literary treatises, and short stories. The writings of San'yutei Encho (1839--1900), Tsubouchi Shoyo (1859--1935), Natsume Soseki (1867--1916), and Shiga Naoya (1883--1971) all explore the effects of this loss on modern fiction-making and reading.; Part I of the dissertation examines the writings of Encho and Shoyo in regards to their explicit (and implicit) engagements with the supernatural. My analysis of their work juxtaposes Encho's affecting response to ghosts' loss of status in modern life with Shoyo's uneasy rendering of that life as a nonmagical place devoid of supernatural agency. In doing so, I redefine ghosts' loss of status as an epistemological shift that imposed limitations and created new possibilities for the representation of human feelings in late Meiji and early Taisho literature.; Part II of the dissertation examines, through close readings of works by Soseki and Shiga, how the deployment of literary affects in their rendering of ghostly things and preternatural distractions invites a rethinking of the relationship between belief and knowledge. By raising the questions of how feelings may compel a change in thought and how reflection, in turn, may alter the way we feel, the short stories of Soseki and Shiga reclaim the supernatural as a structure of feeling which greatly expands our relation to the evidence of things unseen.