January 25, 2008

Illustrated Classical Texts for Women in the Edo Period

Friday January 25

5.00-6.30 PM

C.K. Choi Building Conference Room 120, 1855 West Mall

CENTRE FOR JAPANESE RESEARCH

By Joshua Mostow, (Asian Studies, UBC)

We now know quite a bit about the debates that occurred in the mid-to late-seventeenth century over the appropriateness of the The Tale of Genji  and the Tales of Ise as reading material for girls and women. Due to the overwhelming desire by members of both the warrior (buke) and townsman chônin) class for their daughters to acquire cultural capital associated with the aristocracy, the ability to read and compose waka became a sine qua non, and this desideratum had, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, grown so strong that it almost rendered invisible the previous morally- based objections to the salacious content of the Genji and the Ise. In fact, debates about the appropriateness of the Genji and the Ise were of relatively short duration. By the middle of the eighteenth century, they were over, and it had become "a matter of course that women include Genji in their reading."  The debates were revived in the Meiji period, as scholars and educators struggled with the construction of a canon of national literature.
        In this illustrated lecture, I would like to look at the rise of genres of books published specifically for females in relation to the Hyakunin isshu and the Ise. How were these courtly texts "packaged" for female consumers of the early modern period, and what can such packaging tell us about both the reception of  such "classical" texts and the construction of femininity in the Tokugawa era?

CV: Professor Joshua S. Mostow received his doctorate in the Comparative Literature and Literary Theory Program of the University of Pennsylvania. He has been a visiting researcher at Gakushuin University, Osaka University, and the National Institute of Japanese Literature; and visiting professor at the University of Minnesota; the University of California, Berkeley; and the Institute for East Asian Art History, Heidelberg University. His research interests included inter-relations between text and image, especially in Japanese culture; Japanese women's writing in the court tradition; the ideological construction of the Heian period in the modern era; and Japanese constructions of gender and sexuality.