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Author Watanabe, Takeshi

Title Flowering tales : women exorcising history in Heian Japan
Published [Place of publication not identified] : Brill Academic Publishers : Brill, 2021

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Description 1 online resource
Contents Introduction -- 1. The Genealogy of Eiga monogatari -- 2. The Buried Mothers of the Middle Regent's House -- 3. The Other Empress: Seishi and the Figural Genealogy -- 4. Fathers and Daughters as Spirit Possessions -- 5. The Sequel: Matching Change with Continuity -- Epilogue: The Sacred Mirror -- Glossary of Personages and Their Genealogies by Chapter
Summary "Telling stories: that sounds innocuous enough, but for the first chronicle in the Japanese vernacular, A Tale of Flowering Fortunes (Eiga monogatari), the health of its eleventh-century community was at stake. Flowering Tales is the first extensive literary study of this historical tale that covers about a hundred-fifty years of births, deaths, and happenings of late Heian society, a golden age of court literature. Takeshi Watanabe contends that the blossoming of tale literature, marked by The Tale of Genji, inspired what he describes as Eiga's affective history: an exorcism of embittered spirits whose stories needed to be retold to ensure peace. Tracing narrative arcs of political marginalized personages, Watanabe shows how Eiga, adapting the discourse and strategies of The Tale of Genji, reconnected wayward ghosts into the community through figural genealogies that relied not on blood, but on literary resonances. These reverberations, highlighted through comparisons to contemporaneous accounts in courtiers' journals, echo through shared details in funerary practices, lack of political support, and characterization. Flowering Tales reanimates these voices to trouble conceptions of history: how it ought to be recounted, who got to record it, and why remembering mattered"-- Provided by publisher
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Vendor-supplied metadata
SUBJECT Eiga monogatari. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n82005627
Eiga monogatari fast
Subject Japanese literature -- Women authors.
LITERARY CRITICISM -- Asian -- Japanese.
Japanese literature -- Women authors
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9781684176090
1684176093