Classical World Literatures
Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman Comparisons
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP USA
- Date of Publication 16 January 2014
- ISBN 9780199971848
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages368 pages
- Size 165x236x33 mm
- Weight 610 g
- Language English
- Illustrations 13 illus. 0
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Short description:
Classical World Literatures captures the striking similarities between the ways Early Japanese writers wrote their own literature through and against the literary precedents of China and the ways Latin writers engaged and contested Greek precedents.
MoreLong description:
Ever since Karl Jasper's "axial age" paradigm, there have been a number of influential studies comparing ancient East Asian and Greco-Roman history and culture. Most of these have centered on the emergence of the world's philosophical and religious traditions, or on models of empire building. However, to date there has been no comparative study involving literatures of multiple traditions in the ancient East Asian and Mediterranean cultural spheres. At first glance, it would appear that the literary cultures of early Japan and Rome share little in common with each other. Yet both were intimately connected with the literature of antecedent "reference cultures," China and Greece respectively. These connections had far-reaching legal, ethical, material, linguistic, bibliographical, and literary consequences that made for distinctive Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman dynamics.
Exploring writers from Ôtomo no Yakamochi to Sugawara no Michizane and Sei Shônagon and from Cicero and Virgil to Ovid and Martianus Capella, Classical World Literatures captures the striking similarities between the ways Early Japanese writers wrote their own literature through and against the literary precedents of China and the ways Latin writers engaged and contested Greek precedents. Chapters engage in issues ranging from early narratives of literary history, cultural foundation figures, literature of the capital and poetry of exile, to strategies of cultural comparison in the form of parody and satire or synoptic texts. The book also brings to light suggestive divergences that are rooted in geopolitical, linguistic, sociohistorical, and aesthetic differences between Early Japanese and Roman literary cultures. Author Wiebke Denecke examines how Japanese and Latin writers were affected by an awareness of their own belatedness, how their strategies in telling of the origins of their own literatures evolved, and how notions about simplicity, ornateness, and cultural decline came to be blamed on the influence of their cultural ancestors. Proposing an innovative methodology of "deep comparison" for the cross-cultural comparison of premodern literary cultures and calling for an expansion of world literature debates into the ancient and medieval worlds, Classical World Literatures is both a theoretical intervention and an invitation to reading and re-reading four major literary traditions of the classical world in an innovative and illuminating light.
This is an extraordinary book. Undoubtedly the first of its kind, it opens up a new field of research and it does so in a way that allows both the enormous difficulties and the possible rewards of the endeavour to come to the fore. ... Denecke's work shows that even if, at this stage, final overarching conclusions are not yet possible, a comparison of Japanese and Roman literary culture opens new perspectives on each and allows new insights into the general principles of intellectual history. For this the reader will be as grateful as for Denecke's stimulating theoretical reflections on intercultural comparison.
Table of Contents:
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1
Setting the Stage:
Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman Constellations
CHAPTER 2
Starting avant la lettre:
Ways to Tell the Beginnings of Literature and Eloquence
CHAPTER 3
Latecomers: Of Simplicity, Ornament, and Decline
CHAPTER 4
City-building or Writing?
How Aeneas and Prince Shôtoku Made Rome and Japan
CHAPTER 5
Rome and Kyôto: Capitals, Genres, Gender
CHAPTER 6
Poetry in Exile: Sugawara no Michizane and Ovid
CHAPTER 7
Satire in Foreign Attire: The Ambivalences of Learning in Late Antiquity and Medieval Japan
CHAPTER 8
The Synoptic Machine: Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman Juxtapositions
EPILOGUE
Beyond the Comforts of Influence: Deep Comparisons
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
