This course surveys the literary and cultural history of Japan from the turn of the twentieth century to the end of the Second World War with a particular attention to the discourses and institutions through which a corpus of texts came to be conceived as a canon of a national literature. It is premised on an understanding of literary study not as a narrowly construed discipline, but as an important nodal point in a larger field of cultural and historical studies. After all, the institution of literature - and more specifically, national literature - is historical. As such, it is imperative to pay particular we will track their relations with such historical developments as the formation of the nation-state, the process of urbanization, the impact of the popularization of visual technologies like photography and cinema, changes in the social position of women, and the expansion of the Japanese empire.