The University of Tokyo Graduate
School of Arts and Sciences

Language and Information Sciences

東京大学大学院総合文化研究科言語情報科学専攻

The University of Tokyo

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Department of Language and Information Sciences

3-8-1, Komaba, Meguroku, Tokyo 153-8902 Japan

TEL: 81-3-5454-6376

FAX: 81-3-5454-4329

TAKEDA Masaaki / 武田 将明 (Professor)

Research Interests

I have been working on eighteenth-century British novels, with a view to clarifying the sources of literary innovations introduced after the Revolution of 1688. Several articles of mine deal with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the two literary works that have repeatedly impressed (and sometimes “vexed”—as Swift intended by the publication of Gulliver’s Travels) me. I am now interested in the relationship between continental and British novels in the early eighteenth century, reconsidering the role of nationality in the history of prose fiction.