This dissertation, Anxious Consumption: The Fantastic, Affect, and Transnational Cultural Flows in 1970s-1990s Japan, traces an alternate genealogy of consumption in 1970s-1990s Japan through reading the fantastic in literary and media texts. My use of the term “fantastic” broadly conceives of the category beyond its common limitation to the supernatural and otherworldly, to indicating a form of pervasive structural anxiety behind consumer culture’s celebratory façade of material prosperity and images of economic “progress." Rather than a specific subject position of any particular individual or group, I approach the fantastic as a liminal affective force that is fluid and constantly in-motion, capable of enveloping, implicating, and bypassing various bodies it comes across, while holding the power to disrupt ideological borders, the confines of static forms of identities, and categories such as gender, race, class, and nationality. Emerging at a historical moment characterized as a de-politicized plunge into self-indulgent celebrations of consumerism, the fantastic complicates this narrative through its power to unveil the workings of otherwise seamless immaterial forces of control within a consumerist landscape. Through its power to reveal and de-familiarize what has been naturalized, the fantastic surfaces as an indication of unease—from expressing unspoken anxiety experienced on the affective register, to revealing nationalistic agendas of the nation state. In the texts that I examine, the fantastic is represented by expressions of anxiety manifesting as the abject, Otherness, and the monstrous feminine— liminal figures that, I argue, reveal the psychological structure underlying cultural production in 1970s-1990s Japan. Through reading across various media forms—fiction, literary- nonfiction texts, newspaper reportage, manga, magazines, and protest leaflets—I trace fantastic’s mobilizing force in de-stabilizing dominant and homogenizing frameworks through which consumption in postwar Japan has been narrated. Chapters one and two focus on the affective dimensions of consumption. These chapters look at the on-going negotiation between biopolitical capture and liberatory potentials within consumer culture in an urban landscape. Chapters three and four look at the material dimensions of consumption, focusing on the mapping of consumption onto iterations of space and notions of mobility—across boundaries of nation, race, and species. These chapters examine how marginalized bodies excluded from national visions of prosperity and development make visible limitations of nation states, or human-centric modes of sensing.

This dissertation analyzes the role of sound in language use in early Chinese texts. By focusing on developments of sound-based recurrences such as rhyme and paronomasia, focusing on the classical, foundational texts from the third to first centuries BCE, I offer a new understanding of how textuality, the writing system, and language itself were conceptualized during these centuries. Overall, I argue that these sound-based devices underwent transformative functional and structural changes, in which their primary focus shifted from composition to interpretation. I trace the importance of sound in language use from the Later Mohist textual material through other Warring States texts, including the “Masters’ literature” (zǐ shū 子書), all the way to Hàn dynasty material. Specifically, this dissertation highlights that sound recurrences in early Chinese texts occur both as a structuring element for longer material – whereby sound coordinates textual units – and as a means to express conceptual and ontological connections valid for ancient language users. Additionally, this dissertation proposes to computationally apply existing historical phonological data at scale to digitized early Chinese textual material in order to detect phonological recurrences. Key findings of this study include, firstly, that early Chinese rhymes and paronomasia did not only fulfill ornamental and mnemonic functions but could also form the basis for performative segments, arguments, and ontological connections postulated by and in texts. Secondly, functions of paronomasia shift over centuries, changing from compositional devices to decidedly interpretive tools.

This dissertation addresses intricate intersections among the affective body, global modernity, and literary history in Japanese literature in the early twentieth century, that is, the imperial eras of late Meiji (1868-1912) and Taisho (1912-1926). Uno Koji (1891-1961) and his best-known novella Kura no naka (1919) afford the gravitation that draws together such disparate topics as hysteria, melancholia, ownership and debt, collecting, and biography into mutually generative constellations. As Uno's ambivalent position within canonical literary history forms a fertile relation with the stylistic experimentalism of the text, the pair presents felicitous events across the epistemological boundary between life and writing, and bodily and literary style. Geared towards properly expanding the horizon of inquiry, this study emphatically pursues the reverberations between Uno and Kura no naka and such varied contemporaries as Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Walter Benjamin, Charlie Chaplin, Natsume Soseki, and Virginia Woolf; and thereby illuminates the ineluctably global milieu that was modernity in the early twentieth century. The discussion closely engages with theoretical writings, drawing most extensively on psychoanalytic approaches in order to account for some of the most intractable questions that have tested the disciplinary limits of modern Japanese literature. Chapter 1 explores hysteria as a fresh conceptual passage for feminist criticism, a provocation to the current preoccupation with ideological investigation which uniformly effaces the body as a differential event. Chapter 2 is a metonymic experiment deriving theoretical prompts from the larger discussion on hysteria in order to vitalize the increasingly expiring notion of shishosetsu in light of postcolonial melancholia. While Chapter 3 magnifies an intimate scene of the two visual subjects transpiring on the precipice of hysteria, Chapter 4 traces the kinetic body within particular narrative-spatial coordinates. Both chapters impel towards the question of the relation to the other, and the world, by way of the narrative. Finally, Chapter 5 attempts to reimagine bio-graphy--differentiated from biography--as a form of literary history new precisely for its being a writing of the body. Overall, the human and objectal figures arising from the study are a call of love attuned by several related mimetic modalities: distance to the intimate other, remembering the mother, and becoming the (m)other.

This study consists of the cultural and intellectual interactions between literary elites in China and Korea that took place from the late nineteenth century to 1945. Although most of the relevant historiography of modern Korea emphasizes the influence of Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945) on Korea’s modern historical path, I examine the ways that the post-nineteenth-century cultural and intellectual interactions between the literary elites in China and Korea contributed to the rise of modern Korea. In particular, I focus on Korean literary elites in China—envoys, educators, and exiles—to account for the ways that their engagement with Chinese officials and intellectuals stimulated the swift metamorphosis of Korea that began in the 1860s and continued until the end of Japanese colonial rule (1910-1945).

The first two chapters of the dissertation investigate early Sino-Korean relations before the arrival of Western influences, examining these relations through exchange envoys and the modern print culture in Shanghai, which strongly influenced Korea in the late nineteenth century. These chapters comprise the first part of the dissertation that focuses on Korea’s encounter with the modern world through China. I show how the perceptions of Korean intellectuals in China contributed directly to the change in Korea’s attitude toward the West, and indeed the world, pushing perspectives far beyond the traditional tributary system toward embracing a broader intellectual curiosity and pursuit. Following this, the next two chapters explore the interactions between Chinese and Korean intellectuals in Shanghai during the Japanese colonial period. Each chapter focuses on influential Korean nationalist thinkers and their activities to legitimize Korea’s anticolonial struggle through a Sino-Korean nationalist dialogue and the political impact of Sino-Korean nationalism in East Asia in the twentieth century.

 Sino-Korean relations in the early twentieth century illustrate the essential transnational role of intellectual ideas relating to reform, national history, and nationalist thought in shaping cultures and countries. In the conclusion, I suggest how such a historical argument can support the construction of a regional history of East Asia as an approach for examining the political tension in East Asia that has been caused by historical disputes. This study of sinographic dialogues within the East Asia region contributes in developing a nuanced understanding of regional interaction and its dynamic in East Asia.

My dissertation deals with cultural confrontations between the so-called “barbarian/nomadic” North and the “civilized/Sinitic” South in the multi-lateral world of Middle Period China (800–1300). The Jin dynasty (1115–1234), ruled by the Jurchen conquering minority, has received insufficient scholarly attention especially in the literary field. It was dismissed in late imperial China as either an illegitimate, alien regime compared to the Han Chinese-ruled Southern Song polity (1127–1279), or a scaled-down and short-lived predecessor of the Mongol Yuan empire (1271–1368). My research, however, fleshes out the overall Jin literary culture and poetic production in particular, and illustrates the burgeoning literati culture in North China under Jurchen rule. By demonstrating a rival narrative of claiming China in the Sino-Jurchen North against the cultural orthodoxy conceptualized in the Han Chinese-ruled South, I argue for the plurality and constructedness of Middle Period China as an intersubjective, transcultural, and border-crossing space.To envision a comprehensive picture of Jin dynasty poetry and literati culture, my dissertation is organized in a tripartite structure with seven chapters. Chapters 1 to 3 outline the cultural history of Jin literati community. Integrating socio-historical studies and bibliographical research, I examine the origins and developments of Jin literati, including both Jurchens and Han Chinese, as well as their identity negotiation and cultural legitimacy under Jurchen rule. Chapters 4 and 5 compare the contemporary northern and southern literary fashions. In particular, I combine literary analysis and digital tools to map out both discursive force and social networking that shaped the Jin literati group. Chapters 6 and 7 shift from poetry contests in the North-South space to literary traditions of the past – they explore the historical provenances of Jin literati culture, as well as the Jin refashioning of poetic legacies from previous Tang and Northern Song dynasties. Jin material culture including book history and literati art are also integrated into relevant discussions. In conclusion, I argue that the pluralist topology of Northern Song, Southern Song, and Jurchen Jin literary pasts kept intertwined with and superposed on each other, which always potentially spoke for the heteroglossia and constructedness of Middle Period China.

This dissertation investigates the world’s global entanglement with China through what I call classic Chinese novels’ “global media climates.” From the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) to the “rise of China” after the millennium, classic Chinese novels such as Xiyouji (Journey to the West) and Sanguo Yanyi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms), have circulated around the world in the forms of translations, rewritings, theatrical, and other media adaptations. However, three dominant approaches have thus far limited our understanding of such phenomenon. First, the China-centered approach, which assumes that the novels’ spread symbolizes “Chinese influence” over its neighbors. Second, the China-decentering approach, which accentuates how the novels have been re-appropriated or absorbed as “national canons” in, for example, Japan or Korea. Third, the transnational and pluralist approach, which fully acknowledges the portable use of classic Chinese novels in multiple contexts. While this third approach correctly highlights heterogeneity, it still fails to explain why multitudinous agents across times, spaces or even races, have to and want to assert their own “versions” by returning and resorting to, as well as (re)playing with and participating in the very same infrastructure of classic Chinese novels from time to time. This dissertation suggests that the answer lies with classic Chinese novels themselves – their forms of affect, as well as their affordance of imaginative materials for collaborative world-making. Drawing from new materialism, actor-network theory, ecocriticism, affect theory and infrastructuralism, this dissertation shows how the ecological, formal, affective and infrastructural qualities of classic Chinese novels distinctively afford (i.e. providing materials for) and invite adaptations to globally take place as world-making events. Theorizing Hongloumeng and Jin Ping Mei’s affordances of ecological forms, affective worldmaking and infrastructural network as “global media climates” in the 20th and 21st century, this dissertation adopts a non-anthropocentric approach in showing how cosmological forms of affect (such as “water” in Daoism, and “wind” as conceived in Chinese and East Asian literature) serially link the original novels to each and all of their adaptations across times, spaces, and cultures, dissolving the human-non-human as well the socialism-and-capitalism dichotomy in the age of Anthropocene and Sinocene.

"Spontaneity" is a central albeit problematic concept in Chinese and European aesthetics and ethics. Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037-1101), whose literary and artistic creativity opened a new era in Chinese aesthetics, is regarded as a "natural" and "spontaneous" genius. By examining his life and works, this dissertation aims to reveal the paradoxes and dialectics beneath the ideological construct of "spontaneity." Through close reading, the rhetoric of spontaneity is found to define Su Shi's artistic pursuit, justify his material possession (in the form of connoisseurship), fashion a literary and political persona, and provide religious relief. Further, after rejecting the naïve notion of "spontaneity" as unpremeditated, unintentional, and immediate, I attempt to present a more nuanced understanding of spontaneity that embraces mediacy, including materiality, craft, learning, rules, ritual, and tradition. Such a dialectic notion consistently underlies Su Shi's diverse writings on art and natural beauty and is based upon his theory of human nature.

Throughout this project, close reading is integrated with critical thinking, informed by a range of theories and perspectives. Chinese native intellectual traditions that have influenced Su Shi's thinking are examined as such. Western aesthetic, anthropological, and ethical theories provide systems of reference.The internal logic in Su Shi's thinking on related issues leads my inquiry from the aesthetics of art to the aesthetics of nature, and finally to ethics (defined as the study of the best-lived life). This dissertation is accordingly divided into three parts, each consisting of two chapters.

The first part problematizes the notion of "artistic spontaneity" by analyzing the role and function of art as "skillful means" in the pursuit of enlightenment. Su Shi's understanding of human nature provides a common basis for his theories on artistic and ethical spontaneity alike.The second part discusses how natural beauty is constructed as the paradigm of art and, in this very process, becomes the after-image of art. Su Shi's connoisseur literature on flowers and rocks are examined, and the historical transformations in the cultural meaning of related natural objects are discussed. The third part discusses Su Shi's pursuit of complete spiritual and corporeal spontaneity. He emulated the cultural models of ancient poets and practiced the occult art of Daoist alchemy; in both kinds of activities ritualized behavior and cultural paradigms functioned as medium. Thus his understandings of artistic and ethical spontaneity share the same dialectic model: not only both are mediated, but both mean unimpeded resignation in the course of active and constant self-improvement.

This dissertation delves into the evolution of the concept of newness in early imperial China, arguing that its emergence as a positive attribute was neither self-evident nor inevitable but the result of a deliberate intellectual construction spanning from the third century BCE to first century CE. The Western Han dynasty (206 BCE–9 CE) is often perceived as a period of consolidation and stagnation, dominated by a sanctioned Confucian orthodoxy and marked by a perceived lack of innovation. Yet Han intellectuals actively theorized and valorized “newness” (xin 新), shaping a discourse that framed their own time as a moment of renewal and creative transformation.Drawing on a range of sources, including canonical texts, historiographical narratives, philosophical treatises, and court discussions, this dissertation seeks to reconstruct the intellectual and discursive landscape of the Han dynasty, uncovering perspectives that have been obscured by later historians and modern interpretive frameworks. It foregrounds key figures in the mid-to-late Western Han such as Liu Xiang 劉向 (77–6 BCE), Yang Xiong 揚雄 (53 BCE–18 CE), and Huan Tan 桓譚 (ca. 23 BCE–56 CE), illuminating how their writings contribute to the construction of newness as both a rupture from the past and a continuation of traditions. Rather than merely reflecting historical change, the discourse of newness in this period functioned as a critical agent in shaping imperial ideology, historiography, and intellectual production. This dissertation thus reinterprets Han intellectual history by demonstrating that its scholars did not merely preserve or systematize earlier traditions but conceptualized their era as one of dynamic transformation. In doing so, it contributes to broader discussions on historical consciousness and intellectual renewal in imperial China, challenging narratives that marginalize the Han in accounts of Chinese intellectual history.

The Shuihu zhuan, or The Water Margin as it is usually rendered in English, is one of the major vernacular xiaoshuo novels of the Ming dynasty, and continues to be widely read today. Though little is known about its author or the circumstances of the production of its text, it is known that printed editions of it began to appear on the cusp of a major expansion in publishing activity in sixteenth-century China, and that the vernacular fiction genre flourished along with publishing. The Shuihu zhuan is a major example of both this genre and this publishing trend. Yet behind the very familiarity of its received text are a number of editions that served varying functions in their milieus. The aim of this dissertation is to follow the transformations that the Shuihu zhuan underwent as it appeared in these various incarnations as a means of highlighting some of the major shifts in publishing and modes of consumption of vernacular fiction in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To do so, I employ both historical analysis of the circumstances around the editions' publication and close readings of paratextual materials included in the editions themselves.

Though the novel would later be widely published at the hands of the commercial publishers and has come to be strongly associated with popular and commercial traditions, the earliest editions of the Shuihu zhuan were the products of official and private entities of the Jiajing-era elite. In the first two chapters of this dissertation, I contextualize the Shuihu zhuan in this setting and attempt to uncover the social functions a work of the nascent genre of vernacular fiction served within these elite social circles and within the book culture of the era. I examine the overall publishing projects of these entities in order to determine the social space occupied by their output.
							
The following two chapters are concerned with later, commercial editions of the Shuihu zhuan. At the hands of editors and commentators, these editions were transformed in order to meet the tastes of wider audiences. Prefaces and commentaries aimed to shape the way the Shuihu zhuan was read. Secondary scholarship on the traditional fiction commentaries has typically treated them as an early form of exegetical literary criticism and an agent in the elevation of the vernacular fiction genre; in these chapters, I argue that the commentators appropriate elements of the novel in order to express their own ideas. Moreover, I show that by using vernacular fiction as a channel of expression, commentators reached large audiences outside the traditional literati class without governmental interference.

Building off scholarship which has shown extensive and significant connections between the poetry of Six Dynasties China (220-589) and Heian Japan (794-1185), my dissertation takes an important step forward in rereading Heian literature vis-à-vis its Chinese antecedents. In past work, the "Chinese influence" of Japanese literature has served as the primary analytical framework to understand how the two relate to one another and has helped identify specific instances of textual borrowing of Chinese sources in Japanese texts. While granting the importance of such identifications, my dissertation argues that the use of "influence" has nonetheless failed to account for important textual continuities between Chinese and Japanese literature which exceed the usual scope of identifying distinct instances of borrowing. As an alternative, my dissertation introduces genealogy as a framework for reading Heian poetry alongside Six Dynasties poetry and focuses in particular upon wordplay, double-entendre, and figural language. Through a genealogical framework, my dissertation argues for a widespread and largely unnoted use of related erotic wordplay from the Yutai xinyong (comp. ca. 530), a major anthology of Six Dynasties poetry, to two seminal Heian texts, the Kokinwakash (comp. 905) and Genji monogatari (comp. ca. 1008). By reading the texts through their genealogies, my dissertation presents a case for thinking of East Asian literary texts beyond the limited frameworks of "Chinese" or "Japanese" literature.

This dissertation examines the role of celebrity in early twentieth-century Japanese literary culture. It adopts the framework of literary celebrity, which was developed primarily with American and British modernisms in mind, testing its applicability vis-a-vis the modern Japanese case. I argue that this approach allows us to see early twentieth-century Japan's literary history in a radically different light and also serves to strengthen our general understanding of the interplay between celebrity and literature.

This study follows a series of postwar essays by literary critics Ito Sei (1905-69), Nakamura Mitsuo (1911-88) and Hirano Ken (1907-78), who proposed a view of modern Japanese literature centered on the author, rather than on the written text. In this dissertation, I focus on magazines, scandals and literary networks in order to call attention to the author as the star of literary production and consumption, demonstrating the extent to which modern Japanese literature is a literature of celebrity.

In traditional narrative of Chinese literary history, Du Fu 杜甫 (712-770) is arguably the “greatest poet of China,” and it was in the Song 宋 (960-1279) that his greatness was finally recognized. This narrative naturally presumes that the real Du Fu in history is completely accessible to us, which is not necessarily true.

This dissertation provides another perspective to understand Du Fu and the “greatness” of his poetry. I emphasize that the image of Du Fu that we now have is more of a persona that has been constructed from his available poetic texts. Poets in the Song Dynasty, especially those in the eleventh century, took initiative to construct this persona, and their construction of Du Fu was largely conditioned by their own literary and intellectual concerns.

The entire dissertation is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 investigates how Du Fu’s poetic collection emerged. His collection, as it was compiled and edited, not only provided a platform, but also set restrictions, for the construction of Du Fu. Chapter 2 examines how Du Fu used to be remembered before his collection took form. Memory of him before the eleventh century was considerably different from his received image. The remaining chapters focus on three major aspects of Du Fu’s persona – namely his images as a poet-historian, a master of poetic craft, and a Confucian poet – to analyze how and why Du Fu was constructed as such in the Song. Song poets accepted poetry as a medium loaded with valuable information, and they thus explored Du Fu’s poetry for history; they concerned themselves with issues pertaining to poetic craft, and retrospectively looked for examples in Du Fu’s poetry as established standards; they, as scholar-officials, committed themselves to the state, and declared Du Fu as their model. In sum, Song poets provided particular readings to Du Fu’s particular poems, and claimed these readings as the result of Du Fu’s intentional production. Through interpretation of Du Fu’s surviving poems, they constructed Du Fu as China’s greatest poet.

"Kara kagami" (The Mirror of China) is something of an enigma--only six of an original ten scrolls survive, and there is no critical edition with comprehensive annotation or previous translation. A work composed for Imperial Prince-cum-Shogun Munetaka by the scion of a distinguished line of Confucian scholars, Fujiwara no Shigenori, on a topic of pressing interest in the thirteenth century--the fate of Continental China--it embodies many of the characteristic concerns of Kamakura Japan. Tensions between privatization and circulation of learning, imperial and warrior authority, Japan's envisioning of China and her relations thereto, as well as a larger cosmological narrative all run through the work. Yet they do so ways that challenge now long-held ideas of language, stance towards the Continent and its traditions, and narratives of generic development and resistance.

This dissertation explores the ways in which "The Mirror of China" defies familiar-yet-passé conceptions of medieval Japan. It examines afresh how three issues in medieval discourse--language selection, portrayals of China, and narrating Japan--are refracted in "The Mirror of China" in order to better understand text-based claims of political, cultural, and philosophical authority. "The Mirror of China"'s linguistically diverse manuscripts invite question of the worldviews or allegiances of identity a multilingual text can intimate. Its depiction of China and the implied narratives such a vision creates likewise differ markedly from those of contemporary works. And lastly, the linguistic and thematic innovation it brings to the Heian genre of "Mirror" writing marks a previously obscured turning point in medieval historiographic writing, one that allows an appreciation of the genre as a medieval experiment in crafting histories as legitimating narratives. Drawing on multiple understudied works in addition to better-known writings, this dissertation provides a new understanding of how medieval thinkers exploited languages, images, and traditions in order to create their own visions of authority.

This dissertation explores the invocation of the angry dead as both a social practice of genealogical imagination repeatedly thematized within Heian literary texts and as itself a narrative act whose structure generated a particular voice integral to the development of classical Japanese fiction. I argue that in the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, the process of becoming a powerful vengeful spirit, or even suffering as a victim of such a spirit, provided political, religious, and familial legitimacy in elite aristocratic culture. By closely investigating narrative techniques in a wide range of texts—from canonical literature, such as The Tale of Genji and Tale of Hōgen, to official historical chronicles, poems, and religious treatises—I trace a larger literary practice of invoking vengeful spirits as rhetorical devices in order to narrate the unspeakable, challenge stable meanings, and provide powerful genealogical links to the past, present, and future.

Chapter One delves into one of the most famous of all premodern narratives, The Tale of Genji. By closely examining the multiple roles of female narrators, I argue that women not only mediate the voices of vengeful spirits but that the emergence of these vengeful spirits facilitates the development of the narrative itself. Chapter Two continues to explore The Tale of Genji by illustrating the significance of kinship in the process of becoming a vengeful spirit and how connections to such spirits reinforce genealogical legitimacy. Chapter Three evaluates the writings of Jien, an archbishop from premodern Japan’s most powerful aristocratic family, the Fujiwara, further examining the interdependency between genealogical legitimacy, Buddhist rhetoric, and vengeful spirits by focusing on Jien’s written prayers and his historical account, Gukanshō. Chapter Four reconsiders writings related to one of the most feared vengeful spirits in Japanese history, Retired Emperor Sutoku, who publicly declared his intention to become a vengeful spirit and cursed his own descendants. In total, this dissertation constitutes the first comprehensive literary and historical analysis of vengeful spirits in premodern Japan and argues for understanding these spirits through the intertwined relationship between narration and genealogies.

This dissertation is the first book-length study to consider the literature, primarily prose narratives, engendered by postwar Japanese authors' encounters with African Americans and African American literature. The dissertation argues that the "blackness" of postwar Japanese fiction is written in two modalities. The first mode fixates on the representation, and thus the imaginary mastery, of black (typically male) bodies. Given the influx of African American soldiers and black culture in Japan evoked by the Allied Occupation, the early postwar period saw an uptick in works written in the first mode, i.e. the postwar novellas of authors such as Ishikawa Jun and Kojima Nobuo. The very influx of black people and culture that catalyzed production in the first mode, however, also served as an impetus for the creation of organizations such as the Kokujin kenkyū no kai (The Japanese Association for Negro Studies) and literary endeavors such as the Kokujin bungaku zenshū (The Complete Anthology of Black Literature). This milieu sparked Japanese authors'--Nakagami Kenji and Ōe Kenzaburō are two such examples--interest in reading, interpreting, critiquing and, ultimately, incorporating the tropes and techniques of African American literature and jazz performance into their own literary works. Such incorporation leads to a second mode of writing blackness in Japanese literature. The blackness of literary works written in the second mode arises not by virtue of the representation of black characters, but by virtue of the works' investment in the possibility of writing Japanese literature that has black literature and history in its intertextual and contextual networks.

Whereas previous scholarship itself has fixated on the first mode, this dissertation amalgamates textual analysis and literary historical investigation in order to fully delineate the rich history of black-Japanese literary exchange and bimodal writing of blackness in Japanese literature  Through five case studies that progress chronologically from Ishikawa Jun's "Ōgon densetsu" (The Legend of Gold, 1946) to Yamada Eimi's Payday!!! (2003), this dissertation both reconsiders postwar Japanese literary representations of blackness and argues that black-Japanese literary exchange created a vein of modern Japanese literature shaped by Japanese authors' interpretations of blackness and black fiction.

In this dissertation I set out to question the status of the Analects (Lunyu 論語, or The Selected Sayings) as the most authoritative source of Confucius's teachings and, in the process, to rethink Confucius's place in early Chinese intellectual history.

Part one is a roadmap to the thousands of Confucius sayings preserved in the early corpus. It includes an in-depth discussion of Confucius quotation markers as well as a comprehensive list of texts that quote Confucius. In the course of the chapter, I argue that Confucius quotation before the advent of the <italic>Analects</italic> was a dynamic, creative practice in which authors treated Confucius sayings as venues for the re-performance of inherited wisdom.
							
Part two presents the main argument for revising the dating of the Analects based on a reverse chronological survey of Confucius quotation practice in the early period. I conclude the chapter with the argument that the Analects was compiled between the 150s and 130s BCE, roughly three centuries later than the traditional account would have it.
							
Part three brings the focus back to the <italic>Analects</italic> itself to read the text as a product of a Western Han political, intellectual, and textual milieu. The chapter develops as a series of nine case studies, each of which identifies a different compilation strategy employed by the <italic>Analects<italic> compilers. 
							
In a concluding chapter, I synthesize the arguments of the first three parts and discuss the implications of my findings for the study of early Chinese thought. In an epilogue, I also develop one concrete scenario for the creation of a Western Han <italic>Analects</italic>.

This dissertation reads Tang dynasty narratives (7th–10th centuries) as hermeneutical tools through which the Tang people responded to the increasing unintelligibility of the past in a disrupted present. Moving beyond the dichotomy of historicity and fictionality that has long shaped scholarly discourse, I argue that Tang narratives emerged and transformed not merely as linear evolution of a literary genre or repositories of historical information, but as deliberate efforts to recontextualize the past in response to contemporary ruptures. The surge of storytelling in the eighth and ninth centuries reflects a widespread need for reinterpretation rather than invention: as the epistemological distance from the past widened, storytelling became a means to bridge that gap and render history once again comprehensible, acceptable, and “usable.”Through four case studies, I demonstrate how narrative strategies reflect interpretive efforts to resolve contextual and epistemological disjunctions. Chapter One reveals how the precedent of prisoner release lost its aura, authority, and paradigmatic power when sifted through leishu and other intermediate works. Chapter Two explores how the decontextualized overuse of yuefu titles spurred the invention of “original stories” to restore the lost authority of “history.” Chapter Three shows how lower-ranking officials in provincial administrations voiced their powerlessness and suppression by reinterpreting “silence” in earlier poetry through patterned anecdotes. Chapter Four investigates how objects emerged as narrative protagonists, revealing new emotional and epistemic enchantment with the material world in a changed social reality. By viewing Tang narratives as products of derivative, paratextual, and context-responsive processes, this dissertation recasts them as interpretive solutions— “fabrications” not in the sense of falsehoods, but as deliberate reinterpretations of the past in response to contemporary anxieties. It further argues that intermediate texts, such as leishu, did not merely preserve or transmit knowledge, but actively reshaped the interpretive frameworks of their readers and the textual landscapes. I hope this dissertation serves as a call for a new methodology in the study of Tang narratives—one that reads stories as clues to unspoken questions, and one that reminds us of the power and beauty of staying close to texts and remaining small in our perspectives.

Criticism in Japan's Meiji period (1868–1912) envisioned literature yet to come. In its envisioning, criticism prompted periodization ("modern"), nationalization ("Japanese"), categorization ("literature"), and perceptual standardization ("aesthetic object") of a diverse range of writings from Chinese classics to prose fiction. In this dissertation, I pay particular attention to debates—a crucial site of criticism—of the late 1880s and early 1890s that revolved around literature's boundaries, and investigate how criticism paved the way for modern Japanese literature. The processes and outcomes of criticism's endeavors are the story of this work.

Contrary to the assumption that criticism arises in response to literature, criticism in late nineteenth-century Japan arrived prior to literature by offering visions of a modern national literature. This apparently inverted order was tightly connected to the colonial context in which Japan found itself in the late nineteenth century, where having a national literature was considered as a marker of modernization. During this time, debates, typically formed as exchanges of written essays through print media among intellectuals, operated to strip off multiple potential futures of literature. In so doing, these debates facilitated a homogenized vision of literature as a national, aesthetic object that could serve as a modern, independent form of knowledge.
							
Criticism claimed a role of primacy in shaping the onset of a modern national literature, while demanding for itself to be an objective evaluator of literature from a distance. In time, however, practiced criticism betrayed its premise. Many debates, in their attempts to delineate literature's boundaries and their own placement outside of those, disclosed how such a distance could not be withheld. However, in this very inability to maintain the border between literature and itself, criticism began to exercise its criticality. Precisely in failing to fulfill its ostensible premise, the language of criticism mobilized in debates invited rhetoric that was unfit to the time and space within which it was inserted. This dissertation argues that criticism's failure prompted moments of discordance with contemporary discourses on Japan's modernization, and thereby generated a critique against what historically conditioned the emergence of such criticism itself.

This dissertation presents an alternative history of late medieval literature, one which traces the development of Chinese Buddhist poetry into a fully autonomous tradition. It does so through a careful study of the works of poet-monks in the late medieval period (760–960), especially Guànxiū (832–913) and Qíjǐ (864–937?). Weaving together the frayed threads of the literary traditions they inherited, these poet-monks established a tradition of elite Buddhist poetry in classical Chinese that continued in East Asia until the twentieth century. This dissertation also breaks new methodological ground by using digital tools to analyze and display information culled from medieval sources, and by using poetry composition manuals to understand medieval Chinese poetry on its own terms.

The introduction systematically analyzes the meanings of the concept of “religious literature” and situates this study of poet-monks therein. Part I, comprised of chapters 2, 3, and 4, presents a social history of poet-monks first by examining the invention of the term “poet-monk” in the late eighth century and its development until the tenth, then by mapping literary relations in the late medieval period using social network analysis. It demonstrates the existence and importance of poet-monks to the literary culture of this time. Part II, comprised of chapters 5 and 6, turns to the monks’ poetics at their most extreme: first the wild excess of repetition in song, madness, and incantation; then the austere devotion of “bitter intoning” (kǔyín) and the identification of poetry with meditation. Both extremes are the fruit of the poet-monks’ deliberate mixing of literary and religious practices. The conclusion brings the various threads together to show how the poet-monks identified their religious and literary practices, hints at why their work had been neglected in both Buddhist and classical literary circles, and reflects on the implications of this dissertation for the study of religious poetry. 
							
Thus, this dissertation provides one way of answering the question of how to define religious poetry and, in the process, sheds light on an overlooked corner of Chinese literary history, reconstructing an entire subtradition to demonstrate their fusion of religious and literary practices.

Throughout the late imperial period, conflict and disunity in Chinese politics were tied to a lack of consensus in classical scholarship. As the civil examinations grew in importance, intellectual partisanship and political factionalism became inextricably intertwined.

Generations of Chinese scholars during the Song-Yuan-Ming-Qing dynasties recognized this problem and many sought a solution, while some Late Ming intellectuals resigned to individualism and relativism. Partly in reaction to such Late Ming trends, Qing dynasty scholarship developed methods and techniques that used textual evidence to forge indisputable consensus in the reading and interpretation of classical texts.

Qing evidential research in Canton was at its nineteenth century peak when scholars like Fang Dongshu (1772-1851) and Chen Li (1810-1882) began to question it. They declared the movement’s attempt to establish intellectual consensus a failure and viewed the exclusivist values of its methodology as the cause of that failure. They also traced this exclusionism back to Cheng-Zhu daoxue in the Song-Ming dynasties and argued that it was being perpetuated in Qing dynasty evidential research.

This dissertation systematizes these exclusivist values under the label of a “lineage orientation” in Chinese classicism and politics. It then demonstrates how nineteenth century Chinese scholars countered the lineage orientation with methodological innovation in the pursuit of variations on the concept of pluralism. The notion of pluralism, as a solution to disunity and partisanship, was then further developed by Gu Jiegang (1893-1980) and others in Republican China.