Online Talk by Dr. Thomas Gaubatz: The Textual Townsman and the Particularism of the Early Modern

[Laffin, Christina]

Please join us for an online talk by Dr. Thomas Gaubatz, whose monograph The Textual Townsman: Writing Urban Identity in Early Modern Japan was published by Columbia University Press in December 2025.

 

Date: Thursday, March 5 from 4:30pm – 6:00pm Pacific Time

Sponsors: Department of Asian Studies, Japan Foundation Toronto

Venue: Online via Zoom. Please RSVP here:

https://ubc.zoom.us/meeting/register/gswZkHHzQdujH5ftOBFMww

(Note: you must have a Zoom account in order to register. If you encounter any problems with registration, please try again with the email address associated with your Zoom account.)

Abstract: In 17^th-century Japan, the rapid urbanization of Tokugawa society and the formation of a market economy led to the rise of a new social class of merchants and artisans: the “townsman” (chōnin). The emergence of the townsman was catalyzed by the rise of a commercial woodblock printing industry, which aided in the articulation and circulation of norms of townsman identity. However, despite these processes of textual normalization, the literature of the townsman retains and often foregrounds traces of a constitutive particularism—historical specificities of time and place, occupation, family background, and personality—that may trouble comparatively-minded research. This book talk follows one of the threads of The Textual Townsman, showing how literary works by Ihara Saikaku and Ejima Kiseki configure this tension between the normative and the particularistic, and asking what this tension can tell us about the idiosyncratic historical moment referred to as the “early modern” in East Asia.

 

Profile: Thomas Gaubatz is an interdisciplinary scholar of early modern Japanese literature, woodblock print culture, and urban history. His research explores the nature of the early modern city as a social and media space, representations of the city in literature, Tokugawa popular fiction as a form of urban culture, and the roles played by woodblock print culture in giving shape to new ideas of community and identity. His first book, The Textual Townsman: Writing Urban Identity in Early Modern Japan (Columbia University Press, 2025), is a study of the formation of a merchant class, and a literature of urban identity, between the late 17^th and early 18^th century.

 

 

Christina Laffin クリスティーナ・ラフィン (she, her, hers)
Department of Asian Studies | The University of British Columbia | xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Traditional, Ancestral, Unceded Territory