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Short Abstract:
This panel brings together vernacular and Sinitic poetry from the Nara and Heian periods to discuss how parameters such as poetic vocabulary, seasonal imagery, literary models, and anthologizing strategies actively construct and negotiate the complex environments of literary production.
Long Abstract:
In the literary tradition of Nara and Heian Japan, poetry played a significant role in the imagination of and negotiation between natural, social, and political environments. Although the two Kokinshū prefaces present poetry as a direct response to the natural environment, they also make clear that such response is hardly unmediated but is instead ingrained in social practices where poets actively construct the world they inhabit, aligning themselves with pre-existing Sinitic poetic discourse. Taking a cue from this year's proposed theme, this panel seeks to explore when "things" do not simply happen but are actively imagined and strategically constructed to produce cultural and socio-political meaning. The panel is conceived as a framework for discussing how factors such as poetic vocabulary, seasonal imagery, script, literary models, and anthologizing practices both reflect and shape the imagination of a poet's natural and socio-political environments, and how they contribute to negotiating and legitimizing individual and collective identities as well as cultural and political claims. This panel will approach these issues by bringing together both vernacular and Sinitic poetry from the mid-eighth to the mid-eleventh century, emphasizing the continuity of poetic practices in both modalities in the face of historical and cultural ruptures. Two of the four papers focus specifically on the anthologizing strategies of the two key poetic texts of the Nara period (710-784), the Man'yōshū (Collection for a Myriad Ages) and the Kaifūsō (Verses Recollecting Old Customs, 751), with particular attention on the representation of cultural and socio-political power within a seasonal framework. Two more papers take up Heian texts that are particularly imbued with seasonal language, namely a rhapsody (fu) by the early Heian scholar and poet Sugawara no Michizane (845-903) and the waka banquet prefaces (waka-jo) composed at the behest of the mid-Heian statesman Fujiwara no Michinaga (966-1028), to show how cultural meaning and socio-political identities are created and supported through texts. Collectively, the four papers together explore poetry's enduring power to not only reproduce but actively reshape and negotiate its environments of production.