UC Press announcement

[Aaron Gerow]

The University of California Press is pleased to announce the  
publication of:

The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism

Alan Tansman is Agassiz Professor of Japanese in the Department of  
East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California,  
Berkeley. He is the author of The Writings of Kôda Aya, a Japanese  
Literary Daughter and editor, with Dennis Washburn, of Studies in  
Modern Japanese Literature: Essays and Translations in Honor of Edwin  
McClellan.

  http://go.ucpress.edu/Tansman

  In this wide-ranging study of Japanese cultural expression, Alan  
Tansman reveals how a particular, often seemingly innocent aesthetic  
sensibility—present in novels, essays, popular songs, film, and  
political writings—helped create an "aesthetic of fascism" in the  
years leading up to World War II. Evoking beautiful moments of  
violence, both real and imagined, these works did not lead to fascism  
in any instrumental sense. Yet, Tansman suggests, they expressed and  
inspired spiritual longings quenchable only through acts in the real  
world. Tansman traces this lineage of aesthetic fascism from its  
beginnings in the 1920s through its flowering in the 1930s to its  
afterlife in postwar Japan.

  Full information about the book, including the first chapter and  
table of contents, is available online: http://go.ucpress.edu/Tansman