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Paper short abstract:

This paper illustrates the importance of book format for the reception of premodern literary works. It looks at parallel examples of diverging format in books of the same work, focusing on the imperial anthologies, to show how even textual interpretation could diverge with variety in textual form.

Paper long abstract:

A straitened, unifocal attention to alone the textual content preserved by a given work’s corpus of diverse exemplars continues, even today, to bedevil literary scholarship. Variants in attested text between surviving documentary witnesses might well come up for consideration, but on the question of the transmitting books themselves, or the influence exercised by a book’s form and format on the text it encompassed, one observes a certain awareness deficit. Yet it is clear that premodern Japanese books existed in a variety of contemporary and mutually contrasting formats, choice among which was anything but aleatory, guided both by the intent of a book’s production and the nature of its delivered text. Careful attention, consequently, to the format of a book, to its profile of distinct morphological properties, offers a promising avenue of approach when determining a text’s character or judging its reliability. In this paper, by looking at parallel examples of diverging format in books housing the same work, with a focus on imperial anthology texts, I consider precisely how the interpretation of a text might itself diverge under the influence of such formal variety.　

Furthermore, I take up cases of works being received, not solely in books of unimpaired completeness, but over time additionally in a range of disassembled iterations, each enjoying its own reception. During the Edo period, it frequently happened that older books of marred integrity were simply broken up, their dismantled components being repurposed into “old calligraphic fragments” (kohitsu-gire) for appreciation primarily as aesthetic objects. The reception of such calligraphic samples, moreover, was by no means naively visual: professional appraisal of a fragment’s copyist was understood by contemporaries as prerequisite to any appreciation worthy of the name. Examining this phenomenon in concrete detail and across a number of dimensions, this paper will thus also explore the various novel modes of waka reception to which such a progressive severance, division, and calligraphic appraisal of earlier texts gave birth.

Through these two complementary investigations, I hope to illustrate the importance of attention to the relationship between literary works and the forms of the books that preserved them.