Shinichirō Nakamura and Anglo-American Literature

Abstract

　Shinichirō Nakamura (1918〜) is a scholar of French literature who studied at the French Literature Department of Tokyō University. He has been active as poet, novelist, critic, and translator.

　His publications include Recollections of Post-War literature (1963). The last chapter of this book deals with the history of his reading showing that his knowledge is very wide ranging and that his works are influenced in various and complicated ways by French literature, Japanese classics, Anglo-American literature, and German literature.

　In this study I should like to look into the relation between Shinichirō Nakamura and Anglo-American literature.

　According to the above-mentioned book, he read Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, G. Eliot, Gaskell, Meredith, V. Woolf, Joyce, A. Huxley, Pater, Hawthorne, by the end of the war.

　From these writers very interesting essays were written by Shinichirō Nakamura about Hawthorne and G. Eliot.

　“Novelty of Romance”(1965), his essay on Hawthorne, gives his personal view of Hawthorne and his own unique view of literature.

　Meanwhile in his essay, “The Mill on the Floss”(1951), he pointed out the quality of the descriptions common to G. Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu and the peculiar plots of these novels.

　I think such characteristics are to be found in Shinichirō Nakamura’s Under the Shadow of Death (1947), too.

　I think that there are some relations between The Mill on the Floss and Under the Shadow of Death.