Hamlet and Japanese Men of Letters

Yoshiko Kawachi

doi:10.1515/mstap-2016-0020

Authors

Yoshiko Kawachi Kyorin University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1515/mstap-2016-0020

Keywords:

Shakespeare translation and appopriation, Shakespeare’s impact on Japanese novelists, Novelization of Hamlet, Modernization of Japanese literature

Abstract

Shakespeare has exerted a powerful influence on Japanese literature since he was accepted in the second half of the nineteenth century. Particularly Hamlet has had a strong impact on Japanese men of letters and provided them with the impetus to revive the play in contemporary literature. In this paper I discuss how they have utilized Hamlet for their creative activity and enriched Japanese literature.

Author Biography

Yoshiko Kawachi, Kyorin University

D.Phil. in literature from Keio University in 1997 and taught as Professor of English at Faculty of Foreign Languages and Graduate School of Kyorin University. She is the author of Calendar of English Renaissance Drama 1558-1642 (New York：Garland, 1986), Shakespeare and Cultural Exchange (1995), Shakespeare’s Idea of Time (1998) and Shakespeare’s World (2007). She is the editor of Shakespeare Worldwide and Japanese Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Associated UP, 1998), and one of the editors in chief of Multicultural Shakespeare. Her publications include “Gender, Class, and Race in Japanese translations of Shakespeare” in Shakespeare and the Twentieth Century (Associated UP, 1998) and “Rewriting Shakespeare in a Japanese Context for the Page and the Stage” in Shakespeare’s World/World Shakespeares (Associated UP, 2008).

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