The classic Chinese novel The Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan) tells the story of a band of outlaws in twelfth-century China and their insurrection against the corrupt imperial court. Imported into Japan in the early seventeenth century, it became a ubiquitous source of inspiration for translations, adaptations, parodies, and illustrated woodblock prints. There is no work of Chinese fiction more important to both the development of early modern Japanese literature and the Japanese imagination of China than The Water Margin.
In The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction, William C. Hedberg investigates the reception of The Water Margin in a variety of early modern and modern Japanese contexts, from eighteenth-century Confucian scholarship and literary exegesis to early twentieth-century colonial ethnography. He examines the ways Japanese interest in Chinese texts contributed to new ideas about literary canons and national character. By constructing an account of Japanese literature through the lens of The Water Margin’s literary afterlives, Hedberg offers an alternative history of East Asian textual culture: one that focuses on the transregional dimensions of Japanese literary history and helps us rethink the definition and boundaries of Japanese literature itself.
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on Formatting
- Introduction: Entering the Margins—Reading Shuihu zhuan as Japanese Literature
- 1. Sinophilia, Sinophobia, and Vernacular Philology in Early Modern Japan
- 2. Histories of Reading and Nonreading: Shuihu zhuan as Text and Touchstone in Early Modern Japan
- 3. Justifying the Margins: Nation, Canon, and Chinese Fiction in Meiji and Taishō Chinese-Literature Historiography (Shina bungakushi)
- 4. Civilization and Its Discontents: Travel, Translation, and Armchair Ethnography
- Epilogue: A Final View from the Margins
- List of Titles, Names, and Selected Key Terms
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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