Cultural Hybrids of (Post)Modernism ─ Japanese and Western Literature, Art and Philosophy

Cultural Hybrids of (Post)Modernism starts from the premise that the literary-cultural milieu we live in is characteristically hybrid. To develop that premise, the present volume focuses on explaining the strong impact that Japanese culture, especially Japanese aesthetics, bore on Western intellectuals, Modernist literary writers and artists from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, and, conversely, the impact of Western modernity on Japanese cultural modernization from the Meiji Era onwards. Such intercultural contact has brought on a renewal of cultural formats that can be explained in terms of hybridity as regards both the aesthetic and the intellectual production of the artists and thinkers from Japan and the West throughout the twentieth century and to the present. The outcome of modernization was the creation of new cultural standards in Japan and the West and, with it, new ways of understanding pedagogy and education, a reconceptualization of the Nation versus the individual, a redefinition of the role of women in modernizing society, also a revision of philosophical thought and a new approach to the role of linguistic signs in the production of meaning.

Beatriz Penas Ibanez, PhD, is a full tenured Professor in English and Head of the English and German Department at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). She specialises in Cultural Semiotics, Narratology and the literature of Ernest Hemingway. Her research in the field of Semiotics is specifically focused on the interrelation between language, identity and culture. Her main publications include Interculturalism: Between Identity and Diversity (2006), Paradojas de la interculturalidad: filosofia, lenguaje y discurso (2008), Linguistic Interaction in/& Specific Discourses (2010), Con/Texts of Persuasion (2011).

Akiko Manabe, PhD, is Professor of English at the Shiga University (Japan). She specializes in American as well as Irish Modernist poetry and drama, especially Ezra Pound and other poets he directly influenced such as W. B. Yeats and Ernest Hemingway. Recent publications include Hemingway and Ezra Pound in Venezia (2015), ?W. B. Yeats and Kyogen: Individualism & Communal Harmony in Japan’s Classical Theatrical Repertoire? and ?Pound, Yeats and Hemingway’s ?Encounter with Japan: Kyogen and Hemingway’s Poetry?. She is an executive committe member of academic societies such as Japan Yeats Society, Japan Ireland Society and International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures (IASIL), Japan.