Beyond Brushtalk – Sino–Japanese Literary Exchange in the Interwar Period

Christopher Keaveney is an associate professor of Japanese and co-chair of the Asian Studies program at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon. His publications, which include The Subversive Self in Modern Chinese Literature (2004) and articles published in Sino-Japanese Studies, E-ASPAC, and B.C. Asian Review, revolve around cultural relations between Japan and China in the interwar period. He is married and has two children.

What I most like about this book is that Keaveney's approach to the cultural exchange between Japan and China in the 1920s and 1930s is neither Sinocentric nor Japancentric - it is concerned with the dynamic of cultural interaction and not the 'influence' of one culture on the other. The approach is truly transnational and suggests that modern Chinese literature and its Japanese counterpart are so intertwined that neither can be understood without reference to the other. Keaveney also sets the vitality of these cultural exchanges in the dramatic context of the rising political tension between China and Japan that eventually led to all-out warfare. This book is essential reading for students of both Chinese and Japanese modern literature. -- Kirk A. Denton, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, Ohio State University