Inside Myojo (Venus, 1900--1908): Art for the nation's sake.
详细信息
文摘
This dissertation examines the modern Japanese magazine Myojo (Venus, 1900--1908). Myojo 's legacy endures as a repository of romanticism, poetry, visual art and late Meiji figures, including the poets, Yosano Akiko and Ishikawa Takuboku, and artists, Fujishima Takeji and Nagahara Shisui. Instead of looking at Myojo as a source for individual movements, genres or historical figures, however, my study looks at Myojo itself. By viewing Myojo as the literary and visual arts magazine (bungei bijutsu zasshi) that its editor Yosano Tekkan (Hiroshi) and his group of collaborators collectively known as the Myojo group intended, my study explores the Myojo group's mission to promote the arts, or geijutsu. As a composite product of the New Poetry Society (Shinshisha) and the western-style painting coterie White Horse Society (Hakubakai), Myojo proposed self-cultivation in the arts in order to prevent what the Myojo group perceived as the decline of Japanese civilization. The Myojo group's encouragement of the global exchange of arts, advocating cosmopolitanism, places it within the wider network of contemporaneous western arts magazines such as Jugend (Youth, 1895--1932).;The intersection of Myojo's diverse texts and images with late Meiji cultural discourse forms the basis of the chapters. The first chapter examines the Myojo's group's response to the government censorship of Myojo's November 1900 publication of nudes within the context of the Meiji period Debate on Nudes (Rataiga ronso) and from the perspective of the banning as a defining moment in the magazine's efforts to civilize the nation through cultivation of individual taste (shumi). The second chapter looks at the Myojo group's response to the public's preoccupation with the Russo-Japanese War (1904--1905), exploring the war as a rupture in the free pursuit of learning that threatened to undermine the Myojo group's mission of self-cultivation in the arts. The third chapter addresses the individual and how the Myojo group cultivated the individual as civic-minded artist to contribute to the civilization of Japan. Refusing to accommodate the post-war rise of naturalism (shizenshugi) and its endorsement of the individual as severed from social obligation, Myojo folded, having helped to institutionalize the arts in modern Japan.