P lease join us for an online talk by Dr. Thomas Gaubatz\, whose monograph < em>The Textual Townsman: Writing Urban Identity in Early Modern Japan< /a> was published by Columbia University Press in December 2025.
In 1 7th-century Japan\, the rapid urbanization of Tokugawa society a nd 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 printin g industry\, which aided in the articulation and circulation of norms of to wnsman 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\, oc cupation\, family background\, and personality—that may trouble comparative ly-minded research. This book talk follows one of the threads of The Te xtual Townsman\, showing how literary works by Ihara Saikaku and Ejima Kiseki configure this tension between the normative and the particularisti c\, and asking what this tension can tell us about the idiosyncratic histor ical moment referred to as the “early modern” in East Asia.
This talk is free and open to the public. It is co-sponsored by the UBC Department o f Asian Studies and the Japan Foundation Toronto.
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(Note: you must have a Zoom account in order to register. If you encounter any problems with registration\, pleas e try again with the email address associated with your Zoom account.)
< p>Date & Time:Location:
Online via Zoom
Thomas Gaubatz is an interdisciplinary scholar o f early modern Japanese literature\, woodblock print culture\, and urban hi story. His research explores the nature of the early modern city as a socia l and media space\, representations of the city in literature\, Tokugawa po pular fiction as a form of urban culture\, and the roles played by woodbloc k print culture in giving shape to new ideas of community and identity. His first book\, The Textual Townsman: Writing Urban Identity in Early Mod ern Japan (Columbia University Press\, 2025)\, is a study of the forma tion of a merchant class\, and a literature of urban identity\, between the late 17th and early 18th century.
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