Pleasure in Profit

In the first comprehensive study of the birth of Japanese commercial publishing, Dr Laura Moretti investigates the vibrant world of vernacular popular literature. She marshals new data on the magnitude of the seventeenth-century publishing business and highlights the diversity and porosity of its publishing genres. Moretti explores how booksellers sparked interest among readers across the spectrum of literacies and demonstrates how they tantalized consumers with vital ethical, religious, societal, and interpersonal knowledge. Crucially, readers experienced entertainment within the didactic, finding pleasure in the profit gained from acquiring knowledge by interacting with transformative literature. Culling from a rich variety of archival materials, Pleasure in Profit questions traditional literary histories of this period and speaks to broader conversations about the category of the literary.

In this book launch for the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, Dr Moretti presented some of the key arguments that she puts forward in Pleasure in Profit. She also introduced a number of primary sources and fleshed out the wealth of information packed in this monograph.

Pleasure in Profit – Popular Prose in Seventeenth-Century Japan is published by Columbia University Press. It is available for purchase at this link.

presentation by dr laura moretti

A short summary of the event can be found via the link below, located on the Foundation’s Facebook page:

EVENT SUMMARY

A video of the talk can be found here:

About the contributors