In this dissertation, I explore Wei shu historiography on the early Northern Wei imperial state, which was founded by the Tuoba Xianbei in the late fourth century C.E. In examining the Wei shu narrative of the Northern Wei founding, I illuminate not only the representation of cultural and imperial authority in the reigns of the early Northern Wei emperors, but also investigate historiography on the pre-imperial Tuoba past. I argue that the Wei shu narrative of Tuoba origins and ancestors is constructed from the perspective of the moment of the Northern Wei founding. Or, to view it the other way around, the founding of the Northern Wei imperial state by Tuoba Gui signifies the culmination of the Wei shu narrative on the early Tuoba. This narrative of the early Tuoba past is of course teleological: Essentially everything in this phase of Tuoba historiography leads up to the moment of the Northern Wei imperial founding, including genealogical descent from a son of Huangdi, who is represented as the Xianbei progenitor, in a remote northern wilderness; the continuous succession of Tuoba rulers that followed; and the journeys that brought the Tuoba out of the wilderness and toward the geographical center. In focusing on the account of the inaugural reign of Tuoba Gui, the Northern Wei founder, and the record of his ritual practice as emperor, I have discovered tensions in Wei shu historiography that I believe signal toward some of the actual cultural contestation that attended the founding of the Northern Wei imperial state. The Wei shu historiography on Buddhism in the early Northern Wei then, I argue, presents an alternative source of authority, one that stands outside both an imperial Han inheritance and a culturally Tuoba tradition.

This dissertation examines how modern literature in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan in the late-nineteenth to the early-twentieth centuries was practiced within contexts of these countries' deeply interrelated literary traditions. Premodern East Asian literatures developed out of a millennia-long history of dynamic intra-regional cultural communication, particularly mediated by classical Chinese, the shared traditional literary language of the region. Despite this transnational history, modern East Asian literatures have thus far been examined predominantly as distinct national processes. Challenging this conventional approach, my dissertation focuses on the translational and intertextual relationships among literary works from China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, and argues that these countries' writers and critics, while transculturating modern Western aesthetics, actively engaged with the East Asian cultural tradition in heterogeneous ways in their creations of modern literature. I claim that this transnational tradition was fundamentally involved in the formation of national literary identities, and that it enabled East Asian literati to envision alternative forms of modern civilization beyond national particularity. The dissertation is divided into three parts according to the region's changing linguistic conditions. Part I, "Proto-Nationalisms in Exile, 1880s-1910s," studies the Chinese literatus Liang Qichao's interrupted translation and adaptations of a Japanese political novel by the ex-samurai writer Shiba Shiro and the Korean translation and adaptations of Liang Qichao's political literature by the historian Sin Ch'aeho. While these writers created in transitional pre-vernacular styles directly deriving from classical Chinese, authors examined in Part II, "Modernism as Self-Criticism, 1900s-1930s," wrote in newly invented literary vernaculars. This part considers the critical essays and the modernist aesthetics of fiction by Lu Xun, Yi Kwangsu, and Natsume Soseki, founding figures of modern national literature in China, Korea, and Japan, respectively. Part III, "Transcolonial Resistances, 1930s-40s," addresses the wartime period, when the Japanese Empire exploited the regional civilizational tradition to fabricate the rhetoric of the legitimacy of its colonial rule. This part especially explores the semicolonial Chinese writer Zhou Zuoren, and the colonial Korean and Taiwanese writers Kim Saryang and Long Yingzong, who leveraged that same civilizational tradition and the critiques thereof, in order to deconstruct Japanese cultural imperialism outside of nationalist discourses. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

本論文以1937年至1945年「中日戰爭」、「大東亞戰爭」時期為座標，透過考察大東亞共榮圈下的東亞經驗、記憶、文化與歷史的交錯問題。並試圖以宏觀的角度來檢視日本與亞洲各國的關係，從「跨界」的視域進行東亞文學與文藝體制之研究討論，探討關於日本的大東亞共榮圈之建構概念及其欲型塑的東亞文學觀，與大東亞共榮圈各地域對於此文學建構所衍伸出的知識、權力、文化關係的接受與質變。從日本因應戰爭的動員過程以及帝國主義思潮的發展脈絡中，可以窺見透過國家機器的運作模式，日本企圖在內地、殖民地及各佔領區中塑造「共同體」之想像，並欲透過此「共同體」的想像型塑出「大東亞共榮圈」的東亞一體之翼贊結構。另一方面，大東亞共榮圈中的各地域對於此「共榮想像」也各有不同的對應態勢，從中可以觀看出大東亞文學圈中的文學者們認同的游移，同時對於大東亞議題在不同的統治模式下所衍生出的不同之「協力」圖像。 本論文是以日本的帝國主義發展之脈絡為東亞文學圈的論述中心，並擇取大東亞共榮圈下的五個漢字使用地域為個案討論對象，包括了殖民地：台灣、朝鮮、傀儡政權：滿洲國、中國（華北、華中），以此討論日本文學共榮的表象與實際，以及東亞地區在大東亞想像下的文學樣貌。大東亞的文藝運動可以說是日本國家主義發展的衍生，包括文學者統合團體的誕生、筆部隊的派遣、報國文學的創作乃至於徵用作家的紀行報導，全都受到國家機器的操弄。「八紘一宇」支撐了日本的國體論述，在各個地域中並以日語教育取代血緣的系聯，欲藉由語言型構出「東亞民族」的一體性，同時透過各地域的日本文學者之創作，也顯現了此大東亞的視野，透過戰爭文學、勤勞文學、增產文學、國民文學各種文學書寫模式與文學生產過程，日本文學者們也從不同角度展現出帝國想像。此外，透過統合文學者的文學報國會之串連，也建構了大東亞文學圈的文學者們的「交流」系譜，各地域的文學者也在此文學場域中各自展開「文學共榮」的命題。 / This dissertation examines the entanglement of memory, history and cultural experience within the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere during the Second Sino-Japanese War or Greater East Asia War between 1937 and 1945. From a comprehensive perspective of boundary crossing, this dissertation intends to study the conceptualization and formation of a unified East Asian literary ideal and its literary and cultural institutions by examining the discourse of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in the context of Japanese Imperialism. It further explores the reception and transformation of knowledge, power, and cultural struggles shaped by this literary construction within the cultural sphere. Through the observation of the process of wartime mobilization and the development of imperial ideology, this dissertation reveals that the Japanese Empire intended to implant the image of an imagined community in Japan, the Japanese colonies, and occupied areas. By enlisting this imagined community, the Japanese Imperial would forge a cooperative institution, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, within which “Asia is One.” On the other hand, intellectuals in different parts of Japanese East Asia adopted different positions in response to the imposition of this imagined Co-Prosperity Sphere. By scrutinizing their responses, we will discern these writers’ shifting positions and diverse strategies of “collaboration” under different types of rule and across various regions. The dissertation traces the progress of Japanese Imperialism as the discursive center of the East Asia Literary Sphere. Five regions from the Chinese character-using portions of the empire were chosen as case studies: Japanese colonies such as Taiwan, Korea, as well as puppet regimes like those in Manchukuo, and occupied North and Central China. By surveying the literary performances in these East Asian regions that were under the influenced of the discourse of Great East Asia, we could get past the surface and scrutinize the reality of the ideology of the Japanese Literary Co-Prosperity Sphere. The Greater East Asian Literary Movement was a byproduct of the development of Japanese nationalism. All literary activities were manipulated by the Japanese state apparatus, including the establishment of writers’ alliance, the dispatching of the Pen Writers’ Brigade, the writing of Patriotic Literature, as well as the reportage from Conscript Writers. The discourse of Hakkō ichiu (All the world under one roof) became the core of Japanese national ideology. Japanese became the sole language taught in schools throughout the Japanese empire in an attempt to replace ties of blood and ethnicity with a linguistic affiliation. Through this linguistiunity, Imperial Japan fostered the unity of an “East Asian ethnicity.” Writing in diverse genres such as War Literature, Labor Literature, Increasing Production Literature and National Literature, Japanese writers in different parts of East Asia manifested the imperialist dream of a Greater East Asia. Moreover, through the establishment of organizations such as the Association of Literary Patriotism, writers in the Greater East Asia Literary Sphere gained a legitimate channel to communicate and exchange their ideas on literature. In other words, East Asian writers constructed and developed their own discourses of “Literary Co-Prosperity” within this context.