Sargent Collection
Key items in the collection
Highlights from this collection demonstrate its historical significance and variety.
The Sargent Collection contains 1,066 Japanese books – nearly all published in the 20th century – mostly related to Japanese literature. They include a large number of novels and also poetry, plays, essays, biographies of writers, literary history and critical works.
They cover all phases of Japanese literature from the Nara period (710–794) to modern times.
There is particular strength in the early Edo period, with many works by Matsuo Basho (1644–1694) and Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693).
Modern writers represented in the collection include:
- Tanizaki Jun’ichiro
- Mori Ogai
- Akutagawa Ryunosuke
- Tokuda Shusei
- Natsume Soseki
- Shimazaki Toson
- Mishima Yukio.
There are also Japanese translations of European writers such as:
- Anton Chekhov
- TS Eliot
- Hendrik Ibsen
- William Shakespeare.
The collection also contains dictionaries, encyclopaedias and books on Japanese:
- history
- language
- art
- music
- architecture
- philosophy
- politics
- socialism
- trade unions
- international relations
- trade
- ethnology
- Buddhism
- Christian missions
- guides and maps to Kobe, Kyoto and other cities.
About Geoffrey Sargent
Geoffrey W Sargent (1923–1976) was born in Plymouth, England.
Sargent studied classics at Cambridge University and did a crash course in Japanese while serving in the Army Intelligence Corps from 1943 to 1946.
He returned to Cambridge and completed the Oriental Tripos in 1949 and a doctoral thesis on the Tokugawa novelist Ihara Saikaku in 1954.
Appointments
He was a:
- Visiting Professor of English and Latin at Kochi University between 1954 and 1956
- Visiting Professor of English Literature at Konan University in Kobe between 1956 and 1958.
In 1959, he joined the Department of Oriental Studies at the University of Sydney, where he became Associate Professor in 1967.
He was president of the Oriental Society of Australia from 1963 to 1965.
Writer
Sargent was the author of The Japanese Family Storehouse: Or, The Millionaire's Gospel Modernised (1959).
Translation work
He translated stories of several modern Japanese writers including Mishima Yukio, Tayama Katai and Kikuchi Kan.
Background to the collection
The Sargent Collection was purchased in 1978 from Margaret J Sargent, the wife of Sargent.
The books in the Sargent Collection have been integrated in the Japanese Collection, within the Asian Collections. They are individually catalogued.
This guide was prepared using this reference:
- In Memoriam GW Sargent, Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia, vol 12, 1977, pp 3–4.
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