Medieval commentaries on the Tale of Genji, 1367-1500 : figuring a classic
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Today the Tale of Genji (c. 1000) has come to be associated unambiguously with the Classical Heian period (794-1192) and its peaceful, court-centered society of cultivated aristocrats—this in contrast to the troubled ages that followed it, defined by seven long centuries of almost unbroken warrior supremacy (1192-1868). During the latter period, the Genji is often assumed to have languished under various "medieval" misconstruals in Buddhist, didactic, or antiquarian mode, until in the 18th century a group of revisionist scholars associated with Motoori Norinaga fought successfully to read the work, once more, as the fiction of human passions Murasaki Shikibu had always intended it to be. My thesis begins with the fact that such a narrative is almost entirely contradicted by available documentary evidence. Unlike most other works of our 21st-century Heian canon, the Genji is blessed with a library of commentary literature almost as old as the work itself. The direct light this affords on the concerns of readers across the ages reveals quite a different history of reception. Particularly thorough and long-lasting were the changes that occurred during a brief period of more innovative medieval commentaries clustered thickly in the short span from 1376-1500. This was the early middle Muromachi shogunate, an era that saw the physical concentration of court and warrior elite in the same Capital, and at the same time the social expansion of traditional court civilization to ever broadening circles of incipient cultural literacy. This study seeks to delineate the conceptual changes effected during this short spell, and explain how they produced the Tale of Genji known to us today.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2019; ©2019 |
| Publication date | 2019; 2019 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Knott, Jeffrey Alan |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Carter, Steven, 1943- |
| Degree supervisor | Reichert, Jim (James Robert) |
| Thesis advisor | Carter, Steven, 1943- |
| Thesis advisor | Reichert, Jim (James Robert) |
| Thesis advisor | Levy, Indra A |
| Degree committee member | Levy, Indra A |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Jeffrey Alan Knott. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2019. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2019 by Jeffrey Alan Knott
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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