ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 – the Introduction – contextualizes the spread of Christianity in late nineteenth-century Japan, challenging the widely accepted notion that it played only a marginal role in the literary developments of the period. Providing evidence of Christianity’s influence on the individual formation of many Meiji and Taishō writers and intellectuals, this chapter discusses the intersections between the Christian religion, literature, and politics, and explains how the literary appropriation of a Christian concept of love contributed to the construction of a narrative space that advanced the case of women, their rights and emancipation. The chapter also critically identifies Calvinism and its teachings as a major catalyst not only for the literary deliberations that surrounded the process of self-construction of many modern writers, but also for the skepticism and frustration that later prompted these same writers to distance themselves from the Christian faith.
