Abstract:

This dissertation considers how poems collected in Kaif?s? (751) and the three ninth-century royal anthologies functioned in the context of the increasingly centralized Yamato government of ancient Japan. These "Chinese-language poems" are known collectively as kanshi . My study addresses the following questions: in what ways did they serve to confirm, or (less often) challenge, political authority? What theories existed regarding the proper relationship between writing and governing? How were these ideals put into practice? How did the government monitor poetic activity? What significance should we assign to narratives in which discursive deviance was punished? While maintaining an emphasis on poetic rhetoric, I also seek to understand these poems as ritual gestures, possessing special functions unique to their court contexts. To that end, I consider kanshi together with a wide range of other writings: uta , setsuwa , monogatari , edicts, juridical records, obituaries, diplomatic correspondences, and prefaces to poetic anthologies.

Because kanshi are written in an idiom of classical Chinese, and because they are rife with references to continental texts, it is nearly impossible to discuss them without confronting the additional problem of reception; that is, the ways in which Nara and Heian poets interpreted, quoted, and put to use textual materials that flowed in from the continent. My approach has sought to go beyond familiar nation-state-based articulations of reception such as Nihon-ka (Japanization) and wa-kan (Japaneseness-Chineseness) by construing reception as a historically contingent plurality of textual interpretations. Focusing on the plurality of reception, I argue, renews appreciation for the dizzying variety of imported texts available at court, the range of interpretations that any single text or writer potentially could evoke, and the fact that poets appropriating from the same texts at nearly the same time were motivated by their own immediate (and often disparate) purposes--not out of some inexorable status of just being Japanese.