The Modern Language Association of America today announced its second annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for outstanding scholarly work in East Asian or East Asian diaspora literary or linguistic studies. Satoru Hashimoto, assistant professor of comparative thought and literature at Johns Hopkins University, has received honorable mention for Afterlives of Letters: The Transnational Origins of Modern Literature in China, Japan, and Korea, published by Columbia University Press.

The committee’s citation for the honorable mention reads:

A book of immense breadth and deep erudition, Satoru Hashimoto’s Afterlives of Letters: The Transnational Origins of Modern Literature in China, Japan, and Korea works across three national traditions—Chinese, Japanese, and Korean—and explains the formation of their modern literatures as a process of extensive intraregional conversations as well as engagements with a shared literary and cultural past. Through penetrating close readings and careful contextualization, Hashimoto sheds new light on the translingual, transcultural, and transtemporal dynamics that shaped the work of Lu Xun, Mori Ōgai, Yi Kwangsu, and Sin Ch’aeho, towering literary figures whose relevance beyond their own literary cultures is only just coming into focus. Boldly argued, Afterlives of Letters combines an expansive scope with meticulous analysis, setting new standards of literary scholarship.