This dissertation examines the complex relationship that existed between mass media and literature in pre-war Japan, a topic that is largely neglected by students of both literary and journalist studies. The object of this examination is Bungei shunjū (Literary Times), a literary magazine that played an important role in the formation of various cultural aspects of middle-class bourgeois life of pre-war Japan. This study treats the magazine as an organic unification of editorial strategies, creative and critical writings, readers’ contribution, and commercial management, and examines the process by which it interacted with literary schools, mainstream and marginal ideologies, its existing and potential readership, and the social environment at large. In so doing, this study reveals how the magazine collaborated with the construction of the myth of the “ideal middle-class reader” in the discourses on literature, modernity, and nation in Japan before and during the war.
This study reads closely, as primary sources, the texts that were published in the issues of Bungei shunjū in the 1920s and 1930s. It then contrasts these texts with
other texts published by the magazine’s peers and rivals. Third, it takes up the literary works in the magazine and reads them in the context of creative and critical works that appeared in other media and have been given a place in literary histories.
This study draws attention to the important literary figure Kikuchi Kan, the creator of Bungei shunjū, and to the popular middlebrow literature that has been forgotten. Its conclusion emphasizes the complexity of Bungei shunjū’s encounter with politics, economics and culture of its time, and the active role, both positive and negative, it played in the history of modern Japanese literature and in the history of modern Japan in general. Through this study, the conceptions of literature, modernity, and nation are further clarified.