About the Book
Ever since Karl Jasper's "axial age" paradigm, there have been a number of influential studies comparing ancient East Asian and Greco-Roman history and culture. Most of these have centered on the emergence of the world's philosophical and religious traditions, or on models of empire building. However, to date there has been no comparative study involving literatures of multiple traditions in the ancient East Asian and Mediterranean cultural spheres. At first glance, it would appear that the literary cultures of early Japan and Rome share little in common with each other. Yet both were intimately connected with the literature of antecedent "reference cultures," China and Greece respectively. These connections had far-reaching legal, ethical, material, linguistic, bibliographical, and literary consequences that made for distinctive Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman dynamics.
Exploring writers from Ôtomo no Yakamochi to Sugawara no Michizane and Sei Shônagon and from Cicero and Virgil to Ovid and Martianus Capella, Classical World Literatures captures the striking similarities between the ways Early Japanese writers wrote their own literature through and against the literary precedents of China and the ways Latin writers engaged and contested Greek precedents. Chapters engage in issues ranging from early narratives of literary history, cultural foundation figures, literature of the capital and poetry of exile, to strategies of cultural comparison in the form of parody and satire or synoptic texts. The book also brings to light suggestive divergences that are rooted in geopolitical, linguistic, sociohistorical, and aesthetic differences between Early Japanese and Roman literary cultures. Author Wiebke Denecke examines how Japanese and Latin writers were affected by an awareness of their own belatedness, how their strategies in telling of the origins of their own literatures evolved, and how notions about simplicity, ornateness, and cultural decline came to be blamed on the influence of their cultural ancestors. Proposing an innovative methodology of "deep comparison" for the cross-cultural comparison of premodern literary cultures and calling for an expansion of world literature debates into the ancient and medieval worlds, Classical World Literatures is both a theoretical intervention and an invitation to reading and re-reading four major literary traditions of the classical world in an innovative and illuminating light.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction
CHAPTER 1
Setting the Stage: Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman Constellations
CHAPTER 2
Starting avant la lettre: An Essay on How to Tell the Beginnings of Literature and Eloquence
CHAPTER 3
Latecomers: Of Ornament, Simplicity, and Decline
CHAPTER 4
City-Building or Writing? How Aeneas and Prince Shôtoku Made Rome and Japan
CHAPTER 5
Rome and Kyoto: Capitals, Genres, Gender
CHAPTER 6
Poetry in Exile: Sugawara no Michizane and Ovid
CHAPTER 7
Satire in Foreign Attire: The Ambivalences of Learning in Late Antiquity and Medieval Japan
CHAPTER 8
The Synoptic Machine: Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman Juxtapositions
EPILOGUE
Beyond the Comforts of Influence: Deep Comparisons
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Wiebke Denecke is Associate Professor of Chinese, Japanese, and Comparative Literature at Boston University.
Review :
"This groundbreaking work tackles the core of our engagement in cross-cultural and literary studies: comparisons. The book is one of a kind and could only have been written by a scholar such as Wiebke Denecke, whose wide-ranging academic competence has allowed her to cover a spectrum of topics - as indicated by the book's title - that would usually involve several experts. For the general reader her work gives intriguing insights into unfamiliar texts and
literary cultures and opens up new perspectives on familiar works and genres, not least because she treats the whole spectrum of Japanese literary history, including vernacular and Sino-Japanese texts."
--Gunilla Lindberg-Wada, Monumenta Nipponica
"With its numerous original Greek, Latin, Chinese and Japanese quotes, translated into English, with its vast bibliography, its most useful index, this volume is a paragon of learning
and a masterpiece of transcultural literary history." --Literary Research
"This is an extraordinary book. Undoubtedly the first of its kind, it opens up a new field of research and it does so in a way that allows both the enormous difficulties and the possible rewards of the endeavour to come to the fore. ... Denecke's work shows that even if, at this stage, final overarching conclusions are not yet possible, a comparison of Japanese and Roman literary culture opens new perspectives on each and allows new insights into the general
principles of intellectual history. For this the reader will be as grateful as for Denecke's stimulating theoretical reflections on intercultural comparison." --Bryn Mawr Classical Review
"Deeply learned and intellectually adventurous, Classical World Literatures sets a new standard for comparative study in a global perspective. In her fourfold account of Japanese and Roman relations to the older 'reference cultures' of China and Greece, Wiebke Denecke develops a series of fascinating, revealing comparisons and offers as well a probing essay in method, raising fundamental questions concerning the challenges and opportunities involved
in the study of incommensurable cultures. East Asianists, Classicists, and comparatists of many varieties will see their field differently after reading this strikingly original book." --David Damrosch, Harvard
University
"This is a truly pathbreaking book. Denecke's perception of a deep similarity between the literary cultures of ancient Rome and early Japan is as convincing as it is unprecedented. Remarkable both for the range of its erudition and for its nimble negotiation of local particularities, this is an exemplary work, and one that I hope will be a provocation to further exploration of an unexpectedly rich field for comparative study." --Joseph Farrell, University of
Pennsylvania
"Classical World Literatures is a groundbreaking and innovative work with important implications for the study of East Asia, the Classical world, and comparative literature. The result is a truly distinctive work that casts fresh light on the development of literary traditions and is certain to stimulate further comparative work and similarly ambitious projects in the future." --Peter Kornicki, University of Cambridge
"A literary and historical tour-de-force. Denecke draws brilliant comparisons across two major literary spheres---Greco-Roman and Sino-Japanese--showing the different ways in which a younger, later civilization (Roman and Japanese) utilize, cope with, and parody an older, prior civilization (Greek and Chinese). Denecke compares these two sibling rivalries to each other on both a micro and macro scale to create new perspectives and readings that will startle
both the specialist and the comparativist." --Haruo Shirane, Columbia University
