Tears of blood: Melodrama, the novel, and the social imaginary in nineteenth-century Japan

This study uses the interaction between literary form and the history of publishing and reading in order to trace a genealogy of melodrama and sentimental fiction over the course of the late Edo and early Meiji periods. The nineteenth century---taken as a whole---is not an object of traditional inquiry in Japanese history or literary study; rather, it is convention to think of two 'short nineteenth centuries', the one extending from the Kansei Reforms of the late 1780s through the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and the other from 1868 until the death of the Meiji Emperor in 1912. And yet the extensive production---and, perhaps more importantly, the extensive consumption---of melodramatic and sentimental texts across the nineteenth century suggests a too little discussed continuity of the literary field across the nineteenth century. Looking at a range of fictional narratives including Keiseikai tora no maki, Shunshoku umegoyomi, Hototogisu, and Konjiki yasha, this dissertation uses a focus on the long nineteenth century (1780--1910) to examine the ways that cultural practices and social habits persist in the face of what is often seen, historiographically, as a moment of rupture, a period of overwhelming technological and epistemological shifts separating the pre- or early-modern period from modernity.