As its title clearly indicates, Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature brings together two ideas currently very much in vogue: that of the ‘invention of tradition’, especially in support of the processes of modernization and nationbuilding, and the related idea of the literary canon as a more or less arbitrary expression of power that is, as artificially constructed for political rather than literary or aesthetic purposes. In other words, the traditional view that a long-established cultural monument or institution such as the literary canon represents quite simply, in Matthew Arnold's words, ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’, is now seen as politically naïve at best and as disingenuous (along elitist, racist, sexist, or imperialist lines) at worst. As one of the editors, Haruo Shirane, writes in his Introduction, the word ‘canon’ is used in this book in the ‘broader, more political sense’ to mean ‘those texts that are recognized by established or powerful institutions’ (p. 2). (He refers to Paul Bourdieu's The Field of Cultural Production [1994] as a key text of this new canon theory.) More specifically, the book's objective is to ‘historicize this complex sociopolitical process [of Japanese canon formation], particularly as it relates to the emergence of linguistic and cultural nationalism. which privileged certain texts as ‘cultural icons of Japan's “tradition”’ (p. 1). Against the traditional ‘foundational’ canon theory which sees a foundation in the text, ‘some universal, unchanging, or absolute value’, the new relativistic approach is described by Shirane as ‘antifoundational’ in that it ‘holds that there is no foundation in the text, that works in a canon reflect the interests of a particular group or society at a particular time’ (p. 2). Shirane argues further that this concept of canon implies conflict and change, unlike the terms classic and tradition, ‘both of which suggest something unchanging or given’ (p. 2). ‘Traditions’ and ‘classics’ are now seen as ‘constructed, particularly by dominant communities or institutions’, rather than (presumably, although Shirane does not really spell this out) as naturally or spontaneously arising out of a lengthy aesthetics-based literary-historical process of sifting out the great from the merely good – or the downright bad.