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.

This thesis examines the idea of China in British literature during a clearly defined period. Between 1757 and 1785, when Britain still had little direct contact and cultural exchange with the Chinese, China evoked various attitudes, images and beliefs in the British imagination. At times uncertain and evasive, popular understandings of China were sufficiently malleable for writers of the period to knead into domestic political satire and social discourse, giving fresh expression to popular criticisms, philosophical aspirations, and religious tensions. The period presents several prominent English, Irish, and Scottish writers who use the idea of China precisely in this manner in writings as generically diverse as drama, translation, travel writing, pseudo-Oriental letters, novels, and fairy tales. Some invoke China’s supposed defects to accentuate Britain’s material, scientific, and moral progress, or to feed contemporary debate about decadence in British society and government. Others exploit the notion of a more civilized and virtuous China to satirize what they regard as a supercilious cultural milieu attendant on their own emerging polite and commercial society, or to interrogate their nation’s moral criteria of the highest good, public-spiritedness, or evolving global enterprise. All give the idea of China new currency in the dialectical interplay between literary appeals to antiquity and the pursuit of modernity, enlisting it in philosophical and theological debates of Enlightenment. This thesis will argue that its subject writers, including Arthur Murphy, Thomas Percy, Oliver Goldsmith, John Bell, and Horace Walpole, use the idea of China to help define a British identity as culturally and politically distinct from Europe, especially France, and to contemplate Britain’s place within global history and a broadening world view at mid-century.

This study presents a corpus-based analysis of the use of “wh” sentences by language learners, in language textbooks and in authentic written discourse. It focuses on the polysemeous nature of “wh” words, which can be usedas interrogatives, declaratives and to introduce subordinate clauses. The analysis of “wh” sentences in EFL textbooks showed that there are more prototypical examples at low proficiency levels. When teaching the interrogative, textbooks focus almost exclusively on grammatical words, particularly at the beginners’ level. The analysis of “wh” sentences elicited from Chinese speaking learners of English and Expert users of English suggested that the prototypical structure is very strong in both sets of data, although native speakers tend to use more prefabricated chunks of language. The analysis of “wh” sentences from native speakers and non-native speakers’ written corpora suggested that subordinate clauses are strongly present in both corpora, except for the word “why” in non-native speakers’ data. The use of different words occurring immediately after “wh” words in the two corpora can be explained by (1) the relatively small vocabulary size of the L2 speakers; (2) non-native speakers’ lack of awareness of restricted collocations; (3) L1 transfer; (4) over/under-generalization of rules and (5) textbooks.

In this thesis, I have examined the screen translation of Japanese politeness into Cantonese dubbing as well as Chinese subtitling at three difference levels: (a) face threatening acts; (b) frequently used politeness markers and (c) discernment aspect of politeness. It is not difficult to find equivalents in the target languages for the politeness strategies exploited in dealing with face threatening acts. However, the indirectness expressed through certain commonly adopted politeness markers (such as negative interrogative) in Japanese cannot be conveyed into our target languages easily. Translators also encounter some difficulties when they deal with the discernment aspect of Japanese politeness (i.e. the distinction between plain, formal and honorific form). Both target languages are able to distinguish politeness of two levels instead of three as observed in the Japanese original. Finally, the screen translation, especially the dubbed version, of the two films that I examined demonstrates the dual role of a translated text as not only a reproduction of the original text but also a text which has its function in the target culture.

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La présente thèse explore les représentations de la femme dans des récits orientalisants de sept auteurs français du XVIIIème siècle, classés par ordre alphabétique : Caylus, Crébillon, Diderot, Mme de Genlis, Hamilton, Montesquieu et Voltaire. Les chapitres analysent cinq types de femmes regroupées selon leur rôle narratif. Dans le chapitre premier, j’étudie les figures féminines orientales dans Zadig et La princesse de Babylone de Voltaire. J’y tiens compte de la façon dont la voix narrative perçoit les femmes dans ces récits et quelle place elle leur attribue dans la narration. Dans le chapitre deux, je me penche sur la représentation des Orientales voilées dans « Aphéridon et Astarté », un récit inséré dans Lettres persanes de Montesquieu, et dans Nourmahal de Mme de Genlis. Je considère la femme voilée comme un personnage Autre, je relève ses caractéristiques principales, j’examine son rôle narratif, et j’identifie la valeur significative de son voile. Dans le chapitre trois, je tiens compte des personnages féminins orientaux dans Fleur d’épine de Hamilton et « Ibrahim et Anaïs », un autre récit enchâssé dans les Lettres persanes. Je m’interroge sur le rôle de la femme qui est représentée dans une situation inverse, je considère la place qui lui est attribuée dans le texte et son influence sur les autres personnages du récit. Dans le chapitre quatre, j’analyse les femmes interlocutrices dans Le Sopha de Crébillon et Les Bijoux indiscrets de Diderot. J’étudie la voix féminine dans ces récits et ses interventions dans la narration. J’examine ensuite l’effet de cet engagement sur le fond et la forme du récit. Dans le cinquième et dernier chapitre, j’étudie les femmes dans les Contes orientaux de Caylus. J’explore les différentes fonctions qu’elles remplissent ; je distingue alors entre les narratrices et les femmes objets du discours. Je m’intéresse particulièrement à montrer comment les personnages féminins qui se chargent de la narration utilisent le récit pour influencer le narrataire.