2018 Volume 98 Pages 132-145
In this paper, I take issue with the interpretational framework that structures the “history of modern Japanese literature.” Specifically, I focus on the action and writings of women involved in the class struggle, centering my research on the journal Nyonin Geijutsu (Women's Arts). In the 1920s and 1930s, women fighting for a political ideal were often relegated to the role of “housekeepers” for male activists, causing them to fall into a gap in the interpretative framework for discourse on the proletarian movement, which accepted clearly defined gender roles even as it privileged the working class and the avant-garde. As a result, these women's writings were overlooked both by contemporary literary critics and by literary historians. In this paper, I assert that reading these women's novels now means not only listening to their forgotten voices, but also posing a challenge to the framework of modern Japanese literary history itself.
