Novelists & Newspapers Exhibition
Lecture Series 2017
Moderator: Dr. Peter Robinson (Japan Women’s University)
The Komaba Museum, The University of Tokyo

10 June14.00 – 15.00

Literary Celebrity in Newspapers and Magazines: Australia between the Wars
David Carter (University of Queensland)
The new forms of newspapers and magazines that emerged in the early twentieth century were bothproducts of modernity and producers (or re-producers) of modernity. One of the products of modernity
that circulated through the new periodicals was that of celebrity – the new movie stars but also the stars oftheatre, opera, radio, and, under certain conditions, contemporary artists and writers too. This paper will
use Australian papers from the inter-war years to explore just how writers could be presented as celebrities
in the contemporary press compared to other kinds of celebrity, and how Australian writers might bepresented alongside more famous figures from overseas.
David Carter is Visiting Professor of Australian Studies in the Center for Pacific and American
Studies at the University of Tokyo (2016-2017) and Professor of Australian Literature andCultural History at the University of Queensland. His research is focused in the areas of book
history, publishing, periodical studies, and studies of modernity. His most recent book is Always
Almost Modern: Australian Print Cultures and Modernity and he has recently completed a major studyof the history of Australian books and authors in the USA.

15.00 – 16.00

Capricious Captioning and Narrative Instability:
Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle Newspaper IllustrationsPeter Robinson (Japan Women’s University)
Hugh Lofting’s most famous literary creation, Doctor John Dolittle, a kindly, middle-aged man capable ofconversing with animals, was first introduced to the American reading public in The Story of Doctor Dolittle in
1920. Two years later a UK edition emerged, the same year that The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle was published.
Controversially expunged of racially derogatory language in modern editions, little notice has been taken ofcontemporary newspaper serializations of the Dolittle stories that attempted to capitalize on the commercial
success of the books. Beginning on the 29 October 1922, The New York Tribune serialized both books intheir weekly Sunday Magazine under the collective title The Adventures of Doctor Dolittle. This illustrated lecture
explores how, although the serialization largely maintained close textual fidelity and reused the majority ofLofting’s iconic illustrations, they were often re-captioned, which represents a non-authorial editorialintervention significantly altering narrative positionality.
Peter Robinson is Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature, Japan Women’s
University. Dr. Robinson has published and lectured on subjects as diverse as local history,
philosophy of history, and English literature. His core research focus is intellectual history and thehistory of print culture, with particular expertise on book advertising in the eighteenth century.
Dr. Robinson has curated the current exhibition ‘Novelists & Newspapers’, based on hisextensive private collection. He is co-founder of the Write House; a loose consortium of local
historians based in Sussex, UK, and co-conceived a Heritage Lottery-funded literary outreachproject, A South Downs Alphabet (2017). His most recent article (with A. Watanabe) analyses thereception of Shakespeare in the Soviet Union through the Moscow News. He is currently editing themulti-volume Selected Writings of David Williams (Routledge, 2018/2019), and leading a JSPS-funded project surveying
book advertising in Britain and Japan from the seventeenth century to the digital age.

117 June
14.00 – 15.00

Literary Evangelicalism in the Late Nineteenth Century:
From Romanticism to Sentimentality
Roger Robins (The University of Tokyo)
American Evangelicalism is today viewed as a major, combative subculture that has ambitions for politicalinfluence but operates from outside the cultural mainstream. Indeed, it seems to have fashioned analternative culture with its own unique expressions of art, literature, and music, not to mention its own
alternative educational system and interpretations of science. The reality was quite different in the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This marked a brief era when Evangelicals could reasonably
imagine themselves not as outsiders, but as central figures in the dominant currents of American society,politics, and culture. No clearer window to that lost world exists than the pages of its preeminent
newspaper: The Christian Herald and Signs of Our Times. In this lecture, I trace two serialized works ofVictorian literature. Through them, we see both the established mainstream cultural location of these
Evangelicals and their evolution over time. In particular, we observe a movement from thrilling, masculine
Romanticism toward a more narrowly constrained domestic sentimentality in the offerings served up by
the Christian Herald to its readers. Only in hindsight, perhaps, could that transition be recognized as a signof Evangelicalism’s slow retreat from the mainstream and repositioning as a vital subculture standing inopposition to it.
Roger Robins is Associate Professor in the Center for Global Communications Strategies(CGCS) and Department of English Language, College of Arts and Sciences, The University ofTokyo. A native of Dallas, Texas, USA, he holds a Masters of Divinity from Harvard Divinity
School and a PhD from Duke University. Dr. Robins has written widely on currents within
American Evangelicalism and is the author of several articles and two books: A. J. Tomlinson:
Plainfolk Modernist (Oxford, 2004) and American Pentecostalism (Praeger, 2010).

15.00 – 16.00

Illustration of the Novel and Reproduction Technologies*
Torahiko Terada (The University of Tokyo)
The nineteenth century is known as the age of illustration. Indeed, the period witnessed an efflorescence ofillustrations that accompanied novels published as books or serialized in periodicals. The usage of the term
‘illustration’ to designate the act of adding pictures to texts is itself an invention of the century.
Development of illustration went hand in hand with the development of copying technology. This lecture
aims to, firstly, give a broad overview of illustration technology, paying particular attention to ‘gillotage’, anew technique widely used in France of the late 19th century. The lecture will then offer some reflections
regarding how the technology transformed the reception of novels and illustrations. As the lecture willshow, the abundant production of illustration was a phenomenon closely connected to modernity – justlike newspapers.
Torahiko Terada is Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and Culture,
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo. Dr. Terada obtained a PhD inliterature from the Université Paris 7 in 2001. His publications include: ‘Illustration of Novels:
Illustration as Transition and Transformation’ in Chikashi Kitazaki (ed.), City and Art in Modern
Europe: Paris I, the Capital of 19th Century (Chikurin-sha, 2014); ‘Literature and Painting’ in KouseiOgura (ed.), Introduction to 19th-Century French Literature (Sekaishiso-sha, 2014). He is currently
studying the relationship between text and illustration, using as source materials English
textbooks from all over the world.

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24 June
14.00 – 15.00

The boa constrictor at the nursery door: Anglophone literary culture in the
English-language press of 1920s East Asia
Peter O’Connor (Musashino University)
In the early 1920s, when the first great waves of modernism broke on the shores of East Asia, they werereceived with scant enthusiasm by the Anglophone settler communities of China and Japan. Not yet forthem the ‘mad materialism’ of Marinetti or ‘the new pornography’ of D.H. Lawrence. On the face of it,
looking at the reviews in the English language press of the day - in particular the North-China Daily Newsand Japan Chronicle - expatriate literary tastes were essentially middlebrow and conventional. But readers andaudiences in Kobe, Tokyo and Shanghai were engaged in a lively literary culture in the 1920s. The
Anglophone foreign communities in Japan and China were extraordinarily self-sufficient, supporting
English-language newspapers, amateur dramatic companies, regular visits by touring theatre, opera andcircus companies, accomplished jazz bands and pantomime orchestras, musical circles and literary societies.
This talk examines the structures and stresses of literary culture among English-speaking settler
communities in China and Japan with a particular focus on two novels, Kimono by John Paris (1921) andFlower of Asia, A Novel of Nihon by Gilbert Collins (1923), and on the varied light that these accounts threw
on the relationships between the foreign settlers and their Asian hosts.
Peter O’Connor has been lecturing and writing on the transnational media history of East andSouth-East Asia for some time. Professor O’Connor holds a history doctorate from SOAS,
University of London and teaches at Musashino University, Tokyo. His monograph, The Englishlanguage Press Networks of East Asia, 1918-1945, was published in 2010. More recently, Dr
O’Connor has been managing databases of English-language newspapers for Brill publishers ofLeiden, The Netherlands.

15.00 – 16.00

New Middlebrow Readerships:
Serialised Novels in The Daily Mail Overseas Edition, 1919-1939*
Aiko Watanabe (Waseda University)
During the interwar period in Britain, serialised novels were a well-established part of tabloid newspapers,
reaching an unprecedented readership. Far from being abstruse, philosophical, or standoffish, their overall
light-heartedness, often including sensational and romantic plotlines, appealed to the lower middle classand certain sections of the working class. This popularity reflected the cultural angst that surroundedcanonical literature on the one hand, and suspicion of modernism on the other. However, while the‘middlebrow’ fiction newspapers purveyed is relatively easy to identify, not least because its authors wereoften self-identifying, profiling the ‘middlebrow’ reader in any depth has proven significantly more difficult.
In this short paper, by analysing the overseas edition of the highest selling tabloid paper of the period, theDaily Mail, I show how the novels it published were embedded in a very different narrative than theirdomestic counterparts, specifically tailored to burgeoning expatriate communities, and thus suggesting
middlebrow readership was much more elastic than hitherto imagined.
Aiko Watanabe is Professor in the Faculty of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Waseda University, andholds MA degrees from the University of Warwick (UK) in British Cultural Studies and English
Literature. She has also undertaken doctoral studies at the University of Tokyo. Prof. Watanabe
has published widely on modern British cultural history and literature, especially the activities ofthe British Council and the history of British cultural diplomacy. Her most recent publication,‘“Heirs to the World’s Culture: English Literature in the Moscow News, 1939-1941’ (co-authoredwith Peter Robinson) explored the reception of Shakespeare in Soviet Russia. An expanded
version of this lecture will be published in an anthology of scholarship on ‘middlebrow’ studies,Chuo University Press (Spring, 2018).
*Lecture in Japanese3