This dissertation attempts a concomitant reexamination of two interrelated phenomena. Its primary undertaking is an analysis of mid-to-late nineteenth century gesaku commercial fiction production and its structural transformations during the first decades of the Meiji period, together with the imbrications of its narratological and rhetorical conventions with the language of reportage writing on the page of the Meiji newspaper. In conjunction with, and in order better to situate, the foregoing, its secondary task is to question the literary-historical emplotment of this period and its authors in the later 1920s, at the moment when Meiji literary history first emerges as an analytical object after the institutionalization of literature and journalism as discrete categories of discursive production. To such ends, this dissertation focuses on Kanagaki Robun (1829-1894), whose diverse career coincides what has come to be considered the transitional moment – and thereby recalcitrant to historiographical analysis not altogether fraught with ambivalence – intervening between the latter decades of the Tokugawa period and the ultimate establishment of Literature (bungaku) as an ideologically self-sufficient category of social value and discursive praxis by the first decades of the twentieth century. His survival in the annals of this later literary history proffers an occasion to reconsider the mechanisms involved in the arbitration of social, literary, and aesthetic value. Chapter I begins with a brief sketch of Robun’s early biography and career before the Restoration, through which we hope to delineate some sense of the social and literary-productive context undergirding his activity, specifically, and, more generally, the attitudes towards authorship, adaptation, and narration constituting the prevailing ethos of the time; here, we take a survey of several of Robun’s earlier works, written before his assumption of the “Kanagaki” penname and his first major success with Kokkei Fuji mōde (Ridiculous Pilgrimage to Mount Fuji, 1860-1), many of which are erotic parodies of well-known kabuki or Chinese vernacular narratives, and analyze the manner in which the author constructs his enunciative position therein, before momentarily considering how Robun, at this juncture in his career, was perceived by his peers. Then in conclusion, we anticipate both Robun’s later career, its ambivalent emplotment in literary history and the fraught evaluation of the early Meiji period in toto through a later retrospective on the part of literary critic Tsubouchi Shōyō as he looks back on the literary ecosystem of the early Meiji period and the ethical conflict, latent in his argument, between the ideological dominance of modern rubrics of literary value and incommensurate pleasures of reading as lived experience. Chapters II and III take as their focus Robun’s work in the comic hizakurige-mono genre pioneered by Jippensha Ikku’s Tōkaidōchū hizakurige (Along the Eastern Sea Road by Shank’s Mare, 1802-22), first with his success with Fuji mōde and subsequently, Seiyōdōchū hizakurige (Along the Western Sea Route by Shank’s Mare, 1872-4), a heavily intertextual updating of Ikku’s classic. Chapter II approaches Robun’s contributions to the genre through formal and narratological analysis, considering how the shift in topos, from domestic travel on foot, as in Ikku, to transpacific nautical travel via steamship, precipitates modulations in narrative structure, and weighs the ramifications of these intrageneric transformations. Chapter III shifts its focus to the intergeneric and intertextual, with attention to the modular configuration of its primary intertext in Ikku’s Tōkaidōchū hizakurige and the paratextual apparatus of hanrei, or the prefatory guidelines explicating a given text’s contents, provenance of sources, and editorial policies followed, etc. inherited from non-fictional and academic writing, and how these operate in Ikku and Robun as a space for conceptualizing social knowledge and the figure of the author. Chapters IV and V address the latter portion of Robun’s career, after the Meiji government’s promulgation of the Three Articles on Education and its efforts to conscript gesaku authors like Robun to assist in the education of the new subjects of the Meiji state. Here, we examine the simultaneous devaluation of and dependence upon popular fiction in Robun’s Bunmei kaika-inflected writing, before his relocation to the emergent newspaper industry, at which point we consider the sort of narrative and rhetoric prevalent in reportage writing in the 1870s and its phenotypical affinity with gesaku stylistics. Chapter IV concerns itself with a discussion of the political and economic factors precipitating Robun’s move away from gesaku production and his subsequent literary activity informed by his new role as a government official employed by Kanagawa Prefecture, before his move to the Yokohama mainichi shinbun (Yokohama Daily News). Chapter V then turns to the space of newspaper narrative and the emergence of tsuzuki-mono or serialized narrative, and how their early status as neither consummately fiction nor non-fiction adumbrates aspects of the epistemological economy of readerly desire and social knowledge, aspects subsequently concealed by the later ascendance of bungaku and the shōsetsu as the dominant lens through which socially valued discursive production comes to be apprehended, and the concomitant institutionalization of Journalism as Literature’s reciprocal in the early twentieth century. In the epilogue, we attempt to locate more precisely the coeval emergence of these ostensibly distinct and antagonistic categories in public discourse in the early 1900s, and the concomitant adjudication of the sociocultural value of early Meiji gesaku production and its affiliated figures, anticipating in turn the more rigorous synthesis of a systematized Meiji literary history in the years immediately following the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake.

中國歷史上屢有異邦人士親身踏訪禹域，其中不乏有心之人將見聞感受付諸紙筆，撰文紀行。考慮到此類材料的政治意涵與文類屬性，本文採用「中國行紀」的概念指稱明治時代日本人結合親身踏訪禹域體驗撰寫的紀行文字。本文討論之日本明治（1868-1912）在時段上與中國晚清大致相當。不到五十年裏，兩國都經歷了翻天覆地但又截然相反的變動。也就是說，在日本不斷進步、日趨興盛的同時，中國卻世風日下，走向衰頹。一百多年前日本漢學者的中國行紀從異域鄰人的角度爲今人理解與進入晚清提供了嶄新的研究視角。 / 有關明治漢文中國行紀的先行研究側重於中日政治關係的歷史描繪，對兩國知識人士之間文化交流與知識轉型方面的價值則有待繼續討論。本文將集中討論被視為明治三大漢文中國行紀的竹添進一郎《棧雲峽雨日記》、岡千仞《觀光紀游》與山本憲《燕山楚水紀遊》。它們分別代表了明治前期、中期與後期日本人對中國的旅行書寫，顯示出日本漢文中國行紀逐漸走向盡頭的趨勢。上述三書不僅影響到許多同代及其後大正、昭和時期的中國行紀，而且行紀文體的親歷性與權威性也使其對於近代日本人中國認識的轉變與形塑起到潛移默化的作用。三位作者都是受到過傳統舊式教育的漢學者，通過寫作傳達出親歷中國後想像與現實的落差，又以文學家的筆調記錄了晚清社會政治與士民生活的方方面面，在近代中日文化交流與知識轉型上扮演了重要角色。筆者將以漢文筆談為切入點，討論近代中日知識人士圍繞文化交流、知識轉型、文士往來與書籍酬贈等重要議題展開的交際與互動。本文期望通過勾稽相關文獻史料，回歸晚清歷史語境，藉助異域之眼反躬自省。 / In Chinese history, there were always overseas people travelling to China, including Japanese sinologists, many of whom had recorded their impressions of China by composing travelogues. Considering the political implication and the genre application of this kind of materials, this research adopts the term "travelogues about China" to generalize all these records. The time period to be discussed in this research project is the whole Meiji era, namely, from 1868 to 1912, less than half a century, corresponding roughly to the late Qing period. These two countries had undergone tremendous but reversed revolutions during this period. That is to say, when Japan made progress everyday, China, on the other hand, was in an apparent state of decline. Travelogues about China 150 years ago provide people nowadays with a new research angle to comprehend and enter the late Qing history from Japanese sinologists’ perspectives. / Previous research about on Japanese travelogues about China in Chinese during the Meiji Period focused on historical descriptions of Sino-Japanese political relationships, however, the value of cultural exchange and transformation of knowledge between literary elites from both of these two countries remain to be discussed. This research plans to focus on Takezoe Shin’ichirō’s San’un Kyōu Nikki (A Diary of Clouds Hanging between the Mountains and Rain in the Ravines), Oka Senjin’s Kanko Kiyū (Travel Reports for Sightseeing) and Yamamoto Ken’s Enzan Sosui Kiyū (Travel Reports for the Mountains of North China and the Rivers of South China), which were regarded as the three most representative Japanese travelogues about China in Chinese. Respectively, they represented Japanese travel writing about China in the early, the middle and the late Meiji period and indicated that the ending of the traditional Japanese travelogues about China in Chinese was approaching. In addition, they also had a profound impact on the following Japanese travel literature about China. The genre of travelogue also exercised an invisible and formative influence on Japanese views of China in the modern era. All of these three sinologists were educated in the old style and had deep backgrounds of traditional Chinese learning. Through writing, they expressed the distance between imagination and reality after experiencing China for themselves, and various recorded aspects of the late Qing’s social politics and civil life. They played an important role in modern Sino-Japanese cultural exchange and transformation of knowledge. It will also discuss modern Sino-Japanese literati cultural and book exchange, transformation of knowledge and other issues centered on the practice of conversations by writing Chinese. This research hopes to return to the late Qing and reflect on China through its neighbors’ perspectives. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Parallel title from added title page. / Thesis (Ph.D.) Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2015. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 291-339). / Abstracts also in English.