This dissertation examines the reception of Chinese language and literature during Tokugawa period Japan, highlighting the importation of vernacular Chinese, the transformation of literary styles, and the translation of narrative fiction. By analyzing the social and linguistic influences of the reception and adaptation of Chinese vernacular fiction, I hope to improve our understanding of genre development and linguistic diversification in early modern Japanese literature. This dissertation historically and linguistically contextualizes the vernacularization movements and adaptations of Chinese texts in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, showing how literary importation and localization were essential stimulants and also a paradigmatic shift that generated new platforms for Japanese literature. Chapter 1 places the early introduction of vernacular Chinese language in its social and cultural contexts, focusing on its route of propagation from the Nagasaki translator community to literati and scholars in Edo, and its elevation from a utilitarian language to an object of literary and political interest. Central figures include Okajima Kazan (1674-1728) and Ogyû Sorai (1666-1728). Chapter 2 continues the discussion of the popularization of vernacular Chinese among elite intellectuals, represented by the Ken'en School of scholars and their Chinese study group, "the Translation Society." This chapter discusses the methodology of the study of Chinese by surveying a number of primers and dictionaries compiled for reading vernacular Chinese and comparing such material with methodologies for reading classical Chinese. The contrast indicates the identification of vernacular Chinese as a new register that significantly departed from kanbun. Chapter 3 provides a broader view of the reception of Chinese texts in Japan in the same time period, discussing Hattori Nankaku (1683-1759), a kanshi poet and Ogyû Sorai's successor in literary criticism. Nankaku's contributions include a translation and annotation of the Tang shi xuan (J. Tôshi sen), an anthology of Tang poetry compiled by Ming poet Li Panlong (1514-1570). Such commentaries in accessible Japanese prose reflected the changing readership of Chinese texts, as well as the colloquialization of literary Japanese. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on literary translations and adaptations of Chinese narrative texts in different language styles. Chapter 4 analyzes kanazôshi ("kana booklet") stories by Asai Ryôi (1612?-1691) in comparison to their source text, the Ming Chinese anthology of supernatural stories New Tales Under the Lamplight (Jian deng xin hua). For a comparative perspective on translation style, this chapter also addresses adaptations of the same source story by Korean and Vietnamese authors. Chapter 5 looks into the literati genre of yomihon ("reading books") and focuses on Tsuga Teishô's (1718?-1794?) adaptations of Ming vernacular fiction by Feng Menglong. Teishô, a prolific author considered to be the inventor of this important genre, has been grossly understudied due to the linguistic complexity of his works. His adaptations of Chinese vernacular stories bridged different narrative traditions and synthesized various language styles. This chapter aims to demonstrate Teishô's innovative prose style and the close connections between vernacular Chinese and the development of early yomihon as a sophisticated, experimental genre of popular literature. This dissertation illustrates the inextricable relationships between language transformation and genre development, between vernacularization and narrative literature. It departs from the long-standing paradigm of Sino-Japanese (wakan) literary study, which treats Sinitic writing as an integral part of Japanese literary discourse, emphasizing rather a comparative linguistic approach that addresses Chinese and Japanese linguistic and literary movements in parallel. Within this framework, this project is intended as a platform for further explorations of issues of cultural interaction and translation literature.

This dissertation investigates the development of early modern Japanese joruri puppet theater in the eighteenth century, focusing on representations of female characters in the works of three major playwrights. Joruri developed as a theatrical form combining chanting, music, and puppetry that was regularly performed for urban commoners. The plays were also commercially printed for leisure reading. The genre achieved immense popularity and exercised significant influence over early modern popular consciousness. The contemporary bakufu government licensed theaters and controlled what could appear on stage. In the shadow of this censorship, joruri developed genre conventions that reinforced the social order based on Confucian ideals, a strict class and gender hierarchy in which individuals were of less importance than the family, clan, or state. For this reason, joruri is often viewed as becoming progressively more formulaic and conservative. However, I argue that joruri playwrights straddled the fence between preserving a formula that reinforces the Confucian ethical order and its rigid gender and class hierarchy in order to avoid being banned and subverting it to speak to the audiences' anxieties about authority and the existing societal order. The instances of subversion often involved renegotiation of the genre conventions surrounding female characters whose tribulations arose from their low positions in the social order and whose tragic circumstances were highlighted by the drama. By examining the representations of innovative female characters by three major playwrights over the course of joruri's development, I show that the essence of these plays lies in these moments when joruri creates an alternative world where the repressed voice emerges, gender and class expectations are revisited, and the societal status quo is called into question. Chapter One provides an overview of the history of joruri, particularly in relation to women, its major playwrights and theaters, and its formal conventions. Chapter Two focuses on the representations of prostitutes as heroines in love suicide plays by Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1724). I argue that Chikamatsu subverted the contemporary class and gender hierarchy by depicting prostitutes, who were at the bottom of the social hierarchy, as morally exemplary romantic heroines. Chapter Three examines the recurrent representations of stepmothers in Namiki Sosuke's (1695-1751) plays in the context of the existing conventional representations of stepmothers in joruri. I argue that Sosuke's unconventionally realistic depictions of the dark psychology and transgressive behavior of seemingly-exemplary stepmothers highlight the conflict between individual desire and social obligation and call into question the absolute priority of social obligation. Chapter Four examines the work of Chikamatsu Hanji (1725-1783) written during a time when joruri and kabuki were engaged in a particularly strong cycle of mutual influence and borrowing. I argue that Hanji's reinvention of provincial daughters as unconventionally outspoken in the female realm of love, and yet pawns in the male realm of politics, subtly criticizes societal norms that subordinate the value of the individual to the maintenance of the social order. Through examination of how each playwright established and renegotiated joruri's genre conventions in creating his innovative female characters, this dissertation sheds light on the multiple functions of joruri: as didactic theater, popular entertainment, and a site for subtle criticism where early modern conceptions of gender and class and societal norms were reexamined and reimagined.

This dissertation argues that throughout premodern Japan, classical Japanese poetry (waka) served as a vehicle for the transmission of social knowledge, cultural memory, and specialized information. Waka was originally indispensable to private and public social interactions among aristocrats, but it came to play a diversity of functions for warriors, monks, farmers, merchants, and other social groups at each and every level of premodern society and over many centuries, particularly from the late Heian period (785-1185) through the Edo period (1600-1868). To trace the changes in the social functions of waka, this dissertation explores several moments in the history of waka: the development of a pedagogy for waka in the poetic treatises of the Heian period; the reception of these works in anecdotal collections of the Kamakura period (1192-1333), particularly those geared towards warriors; the use of humorous waka (kyôka), in particular those with satiric and parodic intent, in Muromachi-period (1333-1467) narratives for commoners; and the use of waka as pedagogical instruments for the codification, preservation, transmission, and memorization of knowledge about disciplines as diverse as hawking, kickball, and the tea ceremony. In the epilogue, I trace the efforts of Meiji-period (1868-1911) intellectuals who sought to disconnect waka from any social or pedagogical function, in order to reconceptualize it under the modern European notions of “Literature” and “the Arts.” I conclude that the social functions of poetry in the premodern period should not be understood as extra-literary uses of poems that were otherwise composed as purely literary works in the modern sense. The roles that waka played in pedagogy, in particular in the transmission of cultural memory and social knowledge across diverse social spaces, were an inherent feature of the practice of waka in premodern Japan.

The dissertation addresses a lacuna in current scholarship concerning the role and meaning of figurative language in Indian Buddhist Mahayana philosophical discourse. Attempting to fill part of it, the dissertation explicates and reconstructs an early Yogacara Buddhist philosophical discourse on metaphor (upacAara, nye bar `dogs pa) and grounds it in a broader intellectual context, both Buddhist and non-Buddhist. This analysis uncovers an Indian philosophical intertextual conversation about metaphor that reaches across sectarian lines, and since it takes place before the height of systematized alamkara-sastra in India, stands to illuminate what may be described as one of the philosophical roots of Sanskrit poetics. The dissertation proceeds by providing translations and analysis of key sections on upacara from a variety of Indian philosophical sources. The first part (chapters I-II) examines the concept's semantic and conceptual scope in the theories of meaning and fundamental works of the Nyaya and Mimamsa schools, and in the school of grammatical analysis (focusing on Bhartrhari's Vakyapadiya). The second part (chapters III-V) examines the understanding of the term in some Yogacara sastras and sutras against the background of their broader Buddhist context. It looks at such texts as the Tattvarthapatalam chapter of the Bodhisattvabhumi and the Viniscayasamgrahani, both ascribed to Asanga; Vasubandhu's Trimsika and its commentary by Sthiramati; the Abhidharmakosabhasya and its commentary by Sthiramati; Dignaga's Pramanasamuccaya; and the Lankavatarasutra. This analysis reveals a Yogacara account of upacara that, because of its underlying referential mechanism, understands the term above all as diagnostic of a breach between language and reality and therefore as marking the demise of a correspondence theory of truth. Moreover, it is shown that some Yogacara thinkers developed this theme into a sophisticated theory of meaning that enabled the school both to insist on this lack of grounding for language and, at the same time, to uphold a hierarchy of truth claims, as required by the school's philosophical soteriological discourse. It is argued that a common feature of all these accounts is their understanding of metaphors not just as content carriers (that is, as informative) but also as performative - actively manifesting and invoking the groundlessness of language through the fact of their proliferation.

A mysterious goddess magically generates a swirling wind to conceal the body of a hero. A licentious flower deity seduces a male to experiment with forty-three postures of copulation in a picturesque garden. Such graphic details of late imperial Chinese fiction exhibit two types of power from women: their martial prowess and seductiveness. This dissertation brings these two types of female power together by focusing on the Mysterious Woman (Xuannü 玄女) and the Immaculate Woman (Sunü 素女), two Daoist goddesses who figure prominently in martial arts and erotic stories, respectively. I argue that after being marginalized by institutionalized Daoism, these goddesses played a pivotal role in framing two different, though occasionally interrelated, types of novels. One type of novel concerns war and public affairs, including dynastic crises; the other type concerns domestic life, as exemplified in erotic fiction. The metaphor that equates sex with war relates these two types of stories. I consider these fictional texts to be powerful agents that reused and reinterpreted the goddesses’ stories in late imperial China. I also situate these texts in the cultural network within which they constructed or reconstructed the goddesses’ images in collaboration with Daoist discourse. In this research, I also examine how femininity (yin 陰) is constructed in late imperial Chinese fiction. As I argue, the ideas of invisibility (yin 隱) and licentiousness (yin 淫) constitute the notion of femininity. The Mysterious Woman demonstrates the power of invisibility when being portrayed as a goddess of war and associated with Daoist magic, such as the magic of invisibility (yinshen shu 隱身術). The Immaculate Woman represents the idea of licentiousness as she appears in various forms to seduce male protagonists. The dissertation contains two sections. The first part focuses on the following fictional texts: Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan 水滸傳), Quelling the Demons’ Revolt (San Sui pingyao zhuan 三遂平妖傳), Bull’s Head Mountain (Niutou shan 牛頭山), and Unofficial History of Female Immortals (Nüxian waishi 女仙外史). In this part, I show how the Mysterious Woman is depicted as a war goddess and a moral agent in stories concerning war, rebellion, and dynastic crises. The second part of the dissertation discusses Su’e pian 素娥篇 (The Story of Su’e), Zhulin Yeshi 株林野史 (Unofficial History of the Forest), Yesou puyan 野叟曝言 (Humble Words of A Rustic Elder), and Honglou meng 紅樓夢 (Dream of the Red Chamber). These works create various literary reincarnations of the Immaculate Woman. These reincarnations guide male protagonists to their spiritual awakenings by means of sex. While drawing on fictional and Daoist texts to rebuild the history of the Mysterious Woman and the Immaculate Woman, this research illuminates a complex relationship between Chinese fiction and Daoism.

Taking up a discourse of agrarian literature (nōmin bungaku) from its roots in the first decade of the twentieth century through the late 1930s, this dissertation presents the struggle of outsiders to participate in a powerful system of meaning production amidst the consolidation of the power of state, institutional, and media apparatuses to arbitrate rural working class expression. Relentlessly contested and confused even in retrospect, the very notion of an “agrarian literature” has long called for the deliberate and rigorous review that this study provides. Through investigation of the roles of individual actors and close readings of specific texts, it identifies the kinds of stories that could be told about rural places and the kinds of stories that rural places could tell about themselves, outlining in the process a regime of cultural production with implications for the postwar period and beyond. Studies of Japanese literature between the 1910s and 1930s have long posited twin juggernauts: one a cosmopolitan, bourgeois literature of and for the urban elite, and the other a vibrant new proletarian movement of and for the urban masses. Scholars have accordingly concentrated on these urban-centric categories individually or, occasionally, dealt in the subtleties of their overlap and opposition. This dissertation examines instead the richness and diversity of thought and experience beyond the cities to challenge such readings of Japanese literature during this period. Writing against prevailing scholarly interpretations of agrarian works as alternately romantic figments of an Arcadian idyll or products of festering reactionary backwaters, it sketches the contours of a society and a lineage of literary writing which, for all its geographical separation from the capital, proves no less integral to Japanese modernity. In 1933 the critic Kobayashi Hideo declared modern Japanese literature a “literature of the lost home.” Critical approaches to writing on rural Japan have subsequently centered the feelings of nostalgia and guilt harbored by the literati who abandoned their rural roots for the booming cities. Nearly all have ignored the reality that for many the “home” was never lost at all. For a century the dominant narrative has excluded those who physically remained in the countryside or actively sought its radical social and political reform by means of cultural practice. Their erasure from history has not only produced an incomplete picture of lived experience in rural Japan during this period, but also severed important threads that link prewar authors and texts with postwar and present day cultural production in the countryside. Chapter one surveys the career of author Nagatsuka Takashi (1879-1915), focusing on his novel of rural Japan The Soil (Tsuchi, 1910). Members of the contemporary Tōkyō literary establishment, notably Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) and Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916), had courted this son of Ibaraki landowners as their emissary to the Japanese countryside, but despite The Soil’s bold, experimental style, literary elites would greet the novel with indifference ranging into outright hostility. This chapter reads Nagatsuka’s career and The Soil itself—something the novel’s critics often failed to do—to reckon with its rejection by the period’s foremost individuals and institutions. It examines the literary networks that would sanction, or refuse to sanction, cultural production in and on the Japanese countryside for decades to come. Challenging the later scholarly consensus that has approached The Soil as a kind of ethnography, this chapter also situates Nagatsuka’s writing within the high literary world of the late-Meiji period, arguing for its importance to generations of writers and critics who will promote an “agrarian literature” steeped in both radical politics and a self-consciously literary tradition. Chapter two spans the decade following Nagatsuka’s death in 1915, a period of transforming elite attitudes at the intersection of literary practice and the lived reality of rural Japanese society. With the broadening ideological battleground of the Taishō period (1912-1926) increasingly admitting new materialist conceptions of a rural underclass, artists and intellectuals began to conceptualize art as something of utility for the farmer, a means of solving the “problem” of the countryside within a modernizing nation. The hyper-elite critiques forwarded by Shirakaba group luminaries Arishima Takeo (1878-1923) and Mushanokōji Saneatsu (1885-1976) in the late 1910s would directly inform the activities of smaller coteries including the proto-proletarian journal The Sower (Tanemakuhito, 1921-1923) and the influential Waseda bungaku in the early 1920s, by which time a notion of agrarian literature had gained currency within mainstream literary discourse. Its advocates, who ranged from hard-bitten autodidacts to university professors who could cite Virgil, Theocritus, and Leon Trotsky in the same breath, would promote total societal renewal through a cosmopolitan and forward-looking “literature of the soil.” Chapter three examines the organizing, criticism, and literary work of Inuta Shigeru (1891-1957), a poor farmer’s son who would become the architect of an oppositional agrarian cultural movement, from the mid-1920s through the late 1930s. A fierce admirer and defender of Nagatsuka—whose birthplace stood barely twenty miles from his own—Inuta’s writings nevertheless illustrate the critical distance of a different generation and social class. Inuta’s career has received scant attention from scholars, and during a time when the stench of fascism has clung to anything associated with so-called “agrarianism” (nōhonshugi) the absence of a full account of his activities has left Inuta and his allies to twist in the winds of accusation. In fact his work was heavily suppressed throughout the 1920s and 30s, and his refusal to collaborate with rightwing cultural organizations during the late-1930s met with condemnation from the highest strata of government. In Inuta’s novels and in his journal The Farmer (Nōmin, 1927-1933), he attacked a proletarian movement he could not recognize, a bourgeois literature he called conservative and mired in feudal mechanisms of oppression, and a state ideology that offered little to the poor farmers of communities such as his own.

In classical Japanese poetry (waka), one often equates the poetic persona with the historical poet, perhaps in part due to the fact that waka was very often used for communicative purposes as elevated dialogue. This dissertation deconstructs such a notion of the poetic persona to reveal the various factors that work in tandem to create a textual persona that is in fact rarely a straightforward representation of the poetic author. I show that the poetic persona is the contested ground upon which different actors lay their claims, that waka is a highly performative genre, and that the poet was almost always performing a specific role in front of an audience. As such, the expectations of that audience become a major factor in the “self-portrayal” of the poet, where expressions of emotions, sensations, and ideas are manifested through a complex layering of tropes and conventions that depend on audience expectations (as well as the poet’s own assumption of what these expectations may be). To further complicate matters, the transmission of waka poetry to a wider audience frequently involves the work of compilers of poetry collections, scribes, as well as commentators. To unpack these various factors, I focus on the private poetry collection of the female poet Ise (c. 875 – c. 938), who was well-respected among her early Heian contemporaries. Very little information is known about Ise, so traditionally, her private poetry collection, the Ise shū (Ise Collection), has been used as the primary source of information on this elusive poet. However, as I demonstrate, Ise did not have full control over the construction of her poetic persona; on the one hand, she was often responding to what her audience expected of her, and on the other hand, the Ise shū as we have it today is most likely the work of a compiler who had other motives. Thus, this repository of Ise’s poetry serves not only as an important representation of how Ise’s persona was constructed by both Ise herself and the compiler of her poetry collection, but also as a case study in waka textuality and manuscript culture. In doing so, I highlight the performative and participatory nature of waka—two important characteristics that exemplify the unique qualities of the poetic genre that is waka. This dissertation is organized along two major axes: synchronous and diachronous. Along the synchronous axis, I show how the poet was constantly responding to the expectations of her contemporary audience, both in poetic exchanges, which has a clearly designated audience and specific conventions, and solo compositions, which is often regarded as a freer venue of expression with fewer restrictions. As I argue, the act of composing poetry is inherently performative and more often than not, the poetic persona is an amalgamation of well-established roles within the tradition of waka, catering to what the audience desired of her. Along the diachronous axis, I look at the role of compilers, scribes, and commentators in further constructing the poetic persona through the use of paratexts, including the headnotes to poems explaining their circumstances of composition, the arrangement of poems in a specific sequence, and the framing of a poem. A comparison with other works of various genres shows that there was a great deal of experimentation with the process in which prose headnotes were combined with poetry to create narratives and construct characters. Finally, this dissertation compares various iterations of the same Ise poems in different collections to demonstrate the degree to which the interpretation of a poem and, by extension, the perception of the poetic persona depends on the intermediary roles of the compilers, scribes, and commentators of poetry collections. In short, I show that the poetic persona is the joint product of the multiple authors who work within the performative and participatory milieu of waka. The appendix contains the first full translation in English of the Ise shū, with close to five hundred poems.

This project explores Japan’s complex literary and cultural negotiation with China from the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries, focusing on the role of intermediary texts (dictionaries, encyclopedias, and commentaries) and the different modes of receiving and constructing Chinese culture depending on historical periods and scholarly lineages. As the larger process by which Chinese history and literature became part of the Japanese literary culture has long been studied on the assumption that there is direct textual continuity between Japanese texts (in literary Sinitic) and Chinese continental texts, the tracking down of citations, allusion, and references to Chinese source texts has commanded great scholarly attention. Yet this assumption obscures other, equally important histories – such as a popular understanding of Chinese culture, or a conceptual perception of Chinese culture, that was NOT based on direct textual continuity – that lies at the heart of this project. The introduction outlines three modes of receiving and constructing Chinese literary culture in pre-modern japan. One was the text-based, canonical view of Chinese history and literature, which relied almost exclusively on texts and genres that were canonized in the Nara and Heian periods state university (daigakuryō) – Confucian classics, Chinese official dynastic histories, and Chinese poetry. In contrast with it was a more popular, name-based understanding of Chinese culture that emerged from various intermediary genres (such as anecdotal literature, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and commentaries) both in China and in Japan. This mode of reception and construction was not based on texts so much as on what I call “cultural signs” (particularly Chinese names, well-known anecdotes, and visual cues) and required no knowledge of the original literary Sinitic. Third was a conceptual, term-based perception, manifested in such concepts as “loyalty” and “filial piety.” Written in the same kanji characters, these terms served as common threads linking Chinese and Japanese literary writings on the one hand, but also took on new meanings and associations in the Japanese cultural imagination. Chapter 1 outlines the importation of Chinese books and manuscripts in relation to the center of scholarship and the main intellectual groups up until the twelfth century. Drawing on evidence from commentaries on the Wakan rōeishū (The Collection of Japanese and Chinese Poems for Recitation, 1013) and from The Tales of China (Kara monogatari, late Heian period) on the themes of exile and loyalty, I discuss the rising interests in referencing anecdotal literature and compiling intermediaries (dictionaries, encyclopedias, and commentaries) in the twelfth century that eventually contributed to the formation of a more popular, name-based understanding of Chinese history and literature. Chapter 2 investigates the Japanese medieval interpretations of Chinese official histories (“Chūsei Shiki”), which features a tension and negotiation between the canonical and the non-canonical texts and gravitates towards recurring themes, character types, and core values. In particular, I look into the themes of wisdom, virtue, loyalty, and filial piety in A Miscellany of Ten Maxims (Jikkinshō, 1252) and The Tales of the Heike (Heike monogatari, ca. 1308-1311), which were largely constructed from a relatively more classical, Tang-based perspective, in despite of the fact that Chinese Song dynasty culture had already been imported to Japan along with the introduction of Chinese Chan (J. Zen) Buddhism in the thirteenth through fourteenth centuries. In Chapter 3, I examine the Taiheiki (A Chronicle of Great Peace, 1340s-1371), a unique text that acts as a nexus for many themes of this project. Analyzing the use of Chinese tales, maxims and proverbs, and poetry in relation to the themes of loyalty, wisdom, righteousness, and filial piety, I show that, unlike The Tales of the Heike, the Taiheiki revealed a thriving concern with the Song culture, which involved new editions, new commentaries, and new poetic theory. I also show that a conceptual, term-based perception of Chinese culture was taking shape. Chapter 4 explores the suddenly intensified scholarly exchange among different intellectual groups – the Zen monks, the Shintō priests, warriors, and court aristocrats – in the fifteenth through sixteenth centuries. Tracing the threads of new books and new theories in Kiyohara Nobukata’s lecture notes on the Mōgyū (Inquiry of the Youth), The Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars, and the picture scroll (emaki) of the Xianyang Palace, I discuss the expansion of knowledge and audience from priests and aristocrats to influential military families and wealthy commoners in late medieval Japan, the formation of new imaginations regarding Chinese history and literature, and the final transition from a pro-Tang prospective to a Song-centered understanding of China. In conclusion, I argue for the literary and cultural reception and construction of Chinese culture as not only a large and complex source text, in a long history of Sino-Japanese intertextuality, but as a complex cultural construction that was packaged and modified, sometimes for easy consumption, to reinforce key values (such as loyalty and filial piety), and that was readily identified even by those with limited access to literary Sinitic. By illustrating the processes by which Chinese history and literature were largely filtered through and transmitted by intermediaries into medieval Japanese literary culture, this project provides a new history of the reception of Chinese culture in the Japanese literary imagination.

This dissertation examines the uses of meta-theater in The Peach Blossom Fan, an early Qing historical drama by Kong Shangren (1648-1718), arguing that the meta-theatrical elements of the play serve as an innovative form of historiography. Kong Shangren, a member of the Confucian Kong lineage, is unusual for a Chinese playwright: he was steeped more deeply in the world of Confucian ritual music than the work of writing lyrics for dramatic arias, yet The Peach Blossom Fan is recognized as one of the last great chuanqi dramas of the Ming-Qing period. Kong wrote at a time of great social and cultural transformation, completing The Peach Blossom Fan not long after the violent conflicts of the mid-17th century Ming-Qing dynastic transition were finally coming to an end. At the same time, the literary genre of chuanqi drama was also in the midst of its own transitions, as writers of the early Qing increasingly turned to other literary genres beyond this popular late Ming form. I argue that The Peach Blossom Fan marks a key transition in the development of the chuanqi drama, owing both to the play’s formal innovations that exceed the traditional chuanqi form, such as its rejection of the conventional “grand reunion” finale and re-envisioning of the role-type system, and also to its synthesis of historiographical judgements with the world of theatrical performance. Focusing on the play’s uses of meta-theater, I show how The Peach Blossom Fan models the work of historiography by guiding its readers to cultivate the “cold, clear eyes” of a historical witness. Kong Shangren’s methods as a playwright-historian are at their best in The Peach Blossom Fan’s engagement with Ruan Dacheng (1587-1646): a blacklisted late Ming politician who was also a well-received playwright in his own time. Ruan’s life and work have been largely neglected in previous scholarship, despite his significance as a 17th century dramatist. The Peach Blossom Fan uniquely places Ruan Dacheng on stage as a dramatic character at the same time as it turns Ruan’s own chuanqi drama, The Swallow Letter, into an unsuccessful play-within-a-play. In so doing, The Peach Blossom Fan invites reflection on the writer alongside his work, synecdochically turning The Swallow Letter into the music of the collapsing Ming Dynasty and pronouncing Ruan’s fate as the villainous playwright who wrote it. Kong thereby creates a new dramatic motif of the “playwright on stage” — a method of meta-theatrical literary criticism that is picked up by later playwrights, such as the mid-Qing writer Jiang Shiquan. In The Peach Blossom Fan, Kong Shangren also creates a new vision for the worldly stage within and around his play; one in which the problems of social and theatrical performance are tied up in the formal world of the printed chuanqi drama. I analyze the textual dimensions of the play’s meta-theatrical innovations by focusing on Kong’s engagement with the late Ming Linchuan drama school, from The Peach Blossom Fan’s performative re-casting of the familiar female self-portrait motif, to the play’s meta-theatrical reflections on Kong’s own position as its early Qing playwright. The Peach Blossom Fan is framed through a series of paratexts, including an account of how the play itself came into being. The self-reflexivity of The Peach Blossom Fan as a literary text thereby extends its meta-theatrical frames to Kong Shangren’s world as its playwright, using notions of theatrical performance to examine the work of reading, writing, and ritual. Taken together, I contend, these layers of The Peach Blossom Fan theatricalize the literary genre of the chuanqi, drawing attention to the representational limits of historical narratives and capturing the ways in which writing is yet another form of performance.

This dissertation investigates how textual negotiations of "human feeling" and its ethically disruptive potential fundamentally shaped the production of literature in Japan over the early modern-modern divide well into the 20th century. "Human feeling" (Jap. jô, Chin. qing) was a loaded term in traditional Confucian discourses that subsumed amorous sentiment and sexual desire. It was seen as both a powerful force that could reinforce important societal bonds (such as the one between husband and wife) and as transgressive and ethically suspect. While traditional literary discourse, reaching back to the "Great Preface" of the Chinese Classic of Poetry (Shijing), defined poetry as a medium that could channel potentially unregulated emotions and desires, from the 18th century onward a strong awareness of "human feeling" started shaping the production of a broader spectrum of Japanese genres, such as jôruri puppet theater and, especially from the early 19th century, narrative fiction. I argue that the necessity to represent and write about potentially transgressive feelings and desires lies at the heart of major genres in 19th century Japan. At the same time this engendered the often conscious impulse to regulate these feelings ethically, for instance, through the specific dynamics of gender and plot. I define negotiations of "human feeling" as the simultaneous impulse in writing not only to represent but also to ethically and socially regulate and control feelings and desires. Precisely because the representation and negotiation of "human feeling" define the very essence of Japanese poetic writing and, from the 19th century onward, increasingly that of narrative writing as well, I argue that negotiations of "human feeling" are central to the broader emergence and formation of modern literature in Japan. My first chapter examines selected ninjôbon ("human feeling") by Tamenaga Shunsui (1790-1843) and Kyokutei Bakin's (1767-1848) long narrative yomihon ("books for reading") cycle Nansô Satomi Hakkenden (Eight Dog Chronicle of the Nansô Satomi Clan, 1814-42). I examine how both ninjôbon and yomihon writings explore the deep opposition as well as the implicit affinity between "human feeling" and the sphere of Confucian ethics. My second chapter investigates a variety of novels (shôsetsu) written in the "long" decade of the 1880s: the translated novel Karyû shunwa (Spring Tale of Flowers and Willows, 1878-79), political fiction, and Tsubouchi Shôyô's (1859-1935) rewriting and reform of political fiction at the end of the decade. I for instance examine how these novels -- such as Suehiro Tetchô's (1849-96) Setchûbai (Plum Blossoms in the Snow, 1886) or Shôyô's Imo to se kagami (Mirror of Marriage, 1885-86) -- allegorically negotiate both transgressive sexual desire and chaste spiritual love within a teleological plot structure of democratic reform and heroic activity. My third chapter turns to Meiji-period fiction after 1890, in particular to texts that thematize the new medium of art as well as the figure of the artist or the literary writer. I argue that these texts -- Kôda Rohan's (1867-1947) Fûryûbutsu (The Buddha of Romance, 1889), Mori Ôgai's (1862-1922) German trilogy (1889-90), or Tayama Katai's (1871-1930) Futon (The Quilt, 1907) - continue the ethical negotiation between transgressive sexual desire and spiritual feelings within an implicitly allegorical plot structure that points back to 1880s political fiction. My fourth chapter largely focuses on the diversity of Natsume Sôseki's (1867-1916) early literary oeuvre, including various genres of poetry, so-called sketch writing (shaseibun), and novels. I argue that Sôseki's literary experimentation, for instance in Kusamakura (The Grass Pillow, 1906), with various non-novelistic genres stems from the desire to devise an alternative regime of literature that mediates the representation of "human feeling" in a more detached manner than that of the novel. At the same time, Sôseki's novel writing - as I demonstrate through my reading of Sorekara (And Then, 1909) - brings back a non-detached focus on "human feeling" that profoundly echoes the earlier attempt in 19th century fiction to reconcile transgressive feelings with the telos of a heroic and ethically driven plot.