Resonant Characters: Biographic Writing and Authorship in 1910s Japan

This paper traces the development of a new paradigm of authorship in 1910s Japan. Against existing models that based the legitimacy of authors on master-disciple lineages, the journal Shirakaba introduced the idea of art as an expression of the “self,” in which modern artists could encounter each other spiritually over national and cultural borders. In order to show how authors and publishers deployed this new sense of legitimation through affinities in character and aesthetic sensibility, I examine several collections of literary authors’ biographies produced in the 1910s, highlighting how they were used to both disseminate specific narratives about the authors whose lives they chronicled and also used as self-branding exercises for the Japanese writers who penned them.