Gender, Media, and Melodrama in the Writings of Japanese Author Yoshiya Nobuko (1896-1973)

FAIN: FA-51731-05

Sarah Frederick
Boston University (Boston, MA 02215-1300)

The project is to complete a book length study of the public persona and writings of popular, lesbian Japanese writer Yoshiya Nobuko (1896-1973). I reconsider her work in terms of Japanese female readerships and their importance to modern fiction more broadly. I use Yoshiya's work as a window on to two different topics that dominated debates about Japanese modernity: 1.) changing ideas about gender, sexuality, and the family 2.) the position of mass culture (in this case, melodrama and popular fiction) vis-à-vis so-called "pure" literature.