Paper short abstract:

How do archaeological evidences affect our understanding of classical texts? How do literary canons influence the intellectual framework of posterity and instances of "modernity"? The idea of "Projecting Classicism" I suggest may help to reconceptualize the meaning of "Literary Heritage".

Paper long abstract:

According to the preface of Uji shūi monogatari (mid 13th c.), the dainagon Takakuni started to write the Uji dainagon monogatari while he was lodging at Uji's Byōdōin, listening to stories told by people passing by. This account has been always considered just a narrative gimmick, until the discovery of An'yōshū and excavations at Byōdōin demonstrated its historical reliability, posing new questions to the study of this work.

Last year, excavations of the remains of Saiji temple at Kyoto, demonstrated its symmetry to the Tōji temple and confirmed many assumptions about the structure of Heiankyo. These excavations also forced scholars to rethink the meaning of a famous episode in the Uji shūi monogatari, the Bandainamon Yoshio's dream. In light of this archaeological discovery, the Tōdaiji and Saidaiji that appears in Yoshio's dream are not the Nara ones as previously thought, but Kyoto's Tōji and Saiji, suggesting that his ambition was to conquer the imperial power. This misunderstanding that goes back to the Kojidan (13th c.) was reinforced by the absence of the physical remains of Saiji.

On the contrary, the existence of Genji monogatari as a canonical work, drastically affected the historical reception of the scenery at Akashi in later works, for example in the Kakuichi-bon Heike monogatari's last chapter, Kanjō no maki, in which Lady Kenreimon'in, last survivor of the Heike, reviews the story from her point of view, relativizing the gender dimension of the whole work. While in Akashi, she had a dream where her mother Niinoama and her son emperor Antoku were still alive in the Dragon Palace under the sea. In the cultural framework where Kenreimon'in lived, the Genji monogatari was an esteemed canonical work, so I argue that her dream has been influenced by Genji chapters like Suma and Akashi, that have been reused to give shape to her dream, melting the classical text into the new one.

The mixture between literature and history in medieval works raises new questions about reuses and re-creations of "classicity". In this paper I apply the idea of "Projecting Classicism" to rethink the meaning of "Literary Heritage".