Dominant Forms and Marginal Translations: Re-reading the Emergence of the Novel in Nineteenth-Century Japan

Franco Moretti has defined form as ‘the repeatable element of literature’. However, without a precise definition of the form(s) analysed in a given study, it is difficult to gauge what has been repeated. Moreover, no matter what guise we consider ‘form’ to take, the following objection remains: just because some element has been (or seems to have been) repeated, this does not mean that its function has been repeated too. In terms of Japanese literary history, perhaps no period better demonstrates this than the Meiji period (1868–1912). The main innovation of this paper is to adapt the text-linguistic notions of acceptability and intertextuality (see de Beaugrande and Dressler) to show that this period's ‘familiar history of rupture’ (cf. Zwicker) is indeed a valid framework for understanding the emergence of modern Japanese prose fiction. In this appeal to local context, I locate an alternative to the temptation to see, as Moretti does, an increasing amount of ‘sameness’ on the global literary stage.