Le sujet principal de la thèse est la comparaison entre les voyages maritimes européens et chinois en littérature aux 15e et 16e siècle. Il s'agit des navigateurs et des voyageurs célèbres comme Christophe Colomb, Jean de Léry et Vasco de Gama ; et il s'agit tout de même de certains navigateurs méconnus en Europe, tels qu'André Thevet et un navigateur chinois nommé Zheng He. La recherche aboutit à rassembler un corpus européen et chinois sur la littérature maritime de l'époque des grandes navigations. Aussi bien Colomb face à l'« Amérique » que Zheng He dans les pays de l' « océan ouest » ont évolué dans un monde inconnu. Les populations, les usages et les objets qu'ils découvrent dans ce nouveau monde diffèrent de ceux qu'ils ont connus dans leur monde d'origine. Pour les premiers explorateurs du « Nouveau Monde », quel qu'il soit, quel impact mental avait la découverte ? Aux siècles des grandes navigations, les situations étaient très différentes en Europe et en Chine. Les cultures étaient éloignées, parfois étanches l'une à l'autre. La question est dès lors de savoir comment la pensée et la vision des uns et des autres s'accommodait de la figure de l'Autre. / The main subject of the paper is the comparison between the Chinese and European navigations of the 15th and 16th centuries in literature. The study is about some well-known travellers such as Christopher Columbus, Jean de Lery and Vasco da Gama ; it is also about some underknown travellers such as André Thevet and Zheng He, Chinese navigator of the 15th century. The research is built on various Chinese and European paper works in the theme of great navigations. Both Columbus facing the "America" and Zheng He travelling in the countries of the "Western sea" experienced an impact of the unkown world. The people, the customs and the objects that they found in the new world turned out to be very different from what they had in their old world. For the first explorers, whoever they might be, what was the biggest shock that the discovery brought? During the time of great navigations, China and Europe were in very different situations. Their cultures were far from each other, even in a vacuum. Therefore the question is to know how they adapted their visions and thoughts to the image of the other in the unknown world.

xvii, 417 p. : ill., maps. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / In the postwar era, early modern or Edo period (1600-1868) Japan has most often been represented as a culture in isolation due to ostensibly draconian Bakufu regime policies that promised death to any one returning from abroad ( sakokuron , or the "Closed-Country" theory). While historians of Japan acknowledge limited contact with Dutch, Chinese, Korean, and Ryukyuans, the two hundred and sixty-some years of the Edo Period has consistently been interpreted as a time in which an indigenous Japanese culture developed and flourished without the corrupting influence of extensive foreign contact. This project takes as its subject the stories of thousands of Japanese fisherman and sailors who became distressed at sea ( hyôryûmin ) and subsequently drifted throughout the Pacific before being rescued and repatriated by foreigners during the late 18 th and 19 th centuries. The hundreds of narratives that comprise this textual category of early modern hyôryûki or "castaway narratives" served as the primary means of representing encounters with foreigners in and around the Pacific region and, in turn projecting an emerging Japanese national consciousness. The origins of these hyôryûki are tied to the earlier establishment of diplomatic protocol for handling repatriated castaways primarily within an East Asian context and the kuchigaki ("oral testimonial") narrative records that resulted from interrogations of the repatriated subjects by both bakufu and domain officials. Late Edo castaways also had their stories of drift recorded in kuchigaki form, however with the encroachment of first Russian, and later English, American, and other western ships in the waters off the coast of Japan in the late Edo period (post-1780) other hyôryûki forms--both scholarly and popular--came to proliferate, as it became imperative to translate and re-imagine geopolitical developments in the greater Pacific. This dissertation not only uncovers a diverse textual and cultural category of hyôryûki , but also the complicated interrelationship between cultural production and concrete territorial and political concerns of the State. In so doing, it not only challenges traditional historiography of early modern Japan, but also reclaims a certain cultural specificity for the late Edo Japanese hyôryûki , contextualizing these texts within a more global process of colonization and modern Nation-State formation. / Committee in charge: Stephen Kohl, Chairperson, East Asian Languages & Literature; Alisa Freedman, Member, East Asian Languages & Literature; Maram Epstein, Member, East Asian Languages & Literature; Jeffrey Hanes, Outside Member, History