In Cultures of Forgery, leading literary studies and cultural studies scholars examine the double meaning of the word "forge"-to create or to form, on the one hand, and to make falsely, on the other.

In this fourth volume of Joseph E. Gillet's monumental study, Propalladia and Other Works of Bartolomé De Torres Naharro, all students of Renaissance drama will find a wealth of material on the origins of the modern European theater. Torres Naharro created the cloak-and-sword play almost a century before Lope de Vega. The common­places of romantic comedy appeared, for the first time on any stage, in his Comedia Ymenea published at Naples in 1517. Two of his works, the Soldadesca and the Tinellaria—evocations of the roistering life of the barracks and of a cardinal's scullery—are remarkable examples of dramatic realism avant Ia lettre. The influence of Torres Naharro and his work on the Spanish drama of the sixteenth century was all pervasive. In this volume, all the material gleaned by Dr. Gillet in extensive research is brought into clear focus to show Torres Naharro as a man of the Renaissance and a man of the theater. Of the greatest interest is the exposition of his intuition of the distinction between poetic and historic truth—commedias a fantasia and a noticia—long before the recovery of the true text of Aristotle's Poetics, and of the substratum of primitivism in many of his plays: ritual societies, the medicine man, the right to tribute, social discipline, name changing, loss of memory, sports, games, acrobatics, sorcery, riddles, genealogies, weddings, propitiation and death song, resuscitation, license and chastity, and so on. And this dramatic activity occurred early, antedating most of the Italian plays of the sixteenth century.

The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature tells the story of Japanese literature from its start in the 1870s against the backdrop of a rapidly coalescing modern nation to the present. John Whittier Treat takes up both canonical and forgotten works, the non-literary as well as the literary, and pays special attention to the Japanese state’s hand in shaping literature throughout the country’s nineteenth-century industrialization, a half-century of empire and war, its post-1945 reconstruction, and the challenges of the twenty-first century to modern nationhood. Beginning with journalistic accounts of female criminals in the aftermath of the Meiji civil war, Treat moves on to explore how woman novelist Higuchi Ichiyo’s stories engaged with modern liberal economics, sex work, and marriage; credits Natsume Soseki’s satire I Am a Cat with the triumph of print over orality in the early twentieth century; and links narcissism in the visual arts with that of the Japanese I-novel on the eve of the country’s turn to militarism in the 1930s. From imperialism to Americanization and the new media of television and manga, from boogie-woogie music to Yoshimoto Banana and Murakami Haruki, Treat traces the stories Japanese audiences expected literature to tell and those they did not. The book concludes with a classic of Japanese science fiction a description of present-day crises writers face in a Japan hobbled by a changing economy and unprecedented natural and manmade catastrophes. The Rise and Fall of Japanese Literature reinterprets the “end of literature”—a phrase heard often in Japan—as a clarion call to understand how literary culture worldwide now teeters on a historic precipice, one at which Japan’s writers may have arrived just a moment before the rest of us.