Poets, Paragons, and Literary Politics: Sugawara no Michizane in Imperial Japan
Robert Tuck examines the Meiji reception of the Heian scholar and poet Sugawara no Michizane (845–903) to outline the development of several influential modern narratives of Sino-Japanese literary relations. Beginning with the views of Michizane held by Edo-period Confucian scholars, he proceeds to cover key debates among Meiji scholars concerning Michizane as an icon of imperial loyalty and as a kanshi poet of “utmost sincerity” (shisei). In the 1890s literary scholars attacked all Heian kanshi writing as insincere and formalistic, but from 1902, the one-thousandth anniversary of Michizane’s death, other scholars made Michizane the focus of a new narrative in which Japan overcame the linguistic obstacles of literary Chinese and domesticated kanshi. By analyzing Meiji scholars’ discourse on Michizane, Tuck reveals the cultural and ideological currents that continue to influence narratives of Sino-Japanese literary history to the present day.
“Plus ça Change …”
Katō Shūichi's new history of Japanese literature will be completed with the publication of its second volume, promised by the publisher for 1980, and advertised as “tak[ing] the story from the end of the Muromachi period … to the present day”). Whatever critical response ultimately greets the project, no one is likely to complain that the author tried to keep us in the dark about the theoretical assumptions, much less the analytical approach, that he means to bring to bear upon his subject. Indeed, the entire long introduction (pp. 1–26) with which the first volume of Katō's history begins is an exposition of the author's working hypotheses, under five main subheadings. We are told that “[b]y tracing these factors and seeing how they interrelate, a clear picture of the structure of Japanese literature emerges and it becomes possible to present an orderly account of the history of that literature …” (p. 1). After giving this remarkably clear statement of his analytic work-plan, the author at once plunges into his main task, in chapters on “The Age of the Manyōshū,” “The Age of the Genji monogatari and the Konjaku monogatari,” and “The Age of Nō and Kyōgen.”
Communist History: An Annual Bibliography (2005)
The subject of this bibliography is the scholarly literature of communist history. For the USA coverage is extensive. For the rest of the Anglophone world coverage is selective, while coverage for the rest of the world is more selective still. Coverage of the former and presently communist countries is largely limited to works dealing with the Communist parties of those countries. Anti-communism is covered selectively, with somewhat more emphasis on its interaction with communism than its nature as a movement/ideology per se. Coverage of related topics, i.e. the labor movement, Marxism, other strains of radicalism, etc., is highly selective and limited to items directly relevant to communism. For coverage of current reportage (newspapers, news weeklies, journals of opinion, Internet/WWW discussion lists, etc.) see the Newsletter of the Historians of American Communism and the Historians of American Communism Discussion List (h-hoac@h-net.msu.edu). The Bibliography is organized into seven sections, listed below. Sections 1–5 are form and genre based (monographs, serials, etc.), while sections 6 and 7 are format based (sound and visual, electronic). Entries are arranged alphabetically within each section. Where the number of entries warrants it, a section is divided into USA and Other. There is no index. Please be aware that most citations for items in electronic format are listed under their appropriate form/genre, i.e. articles in electronic serials are listed under serials. Section 7 (Internet, WWW, etc.) only contains citations for items in forms and genres irreducibly unique to the electronic environment, i.e. discussion lists (and postings and threads therein) and for those web sites and other electronic resources not subsumed under categories 1–7. Items cited are from the calendar year in the title of the Bibliography, with two exceptions, Internet/WWW items, where publication/creation date information is often unavailable or indeterminate, and older items not cited