Reflecting the past : place, language, and principle in Japan's medieval mirror genre / Erin L. Brightwell.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Brightwell, Erin L., 1973- author.

Series:

Harvard East Asian monographs ; 433.

Harvard East Asian monographs ; 433

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

History.

Philosophy.

Japan--Historiography.

Japan.

Historiography.

Japan--History--Philosophy.

Japan--History--To 1600.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

xiii, 322 pages : color illustrations ; 24 cm.

Other Title:

Place, language, and principle in Japan's medieval mirror genre

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Asia Center, 2020.

Summary:

"Reflecting the Past is the first English-language study to address the role of historiography in medieval Japan, an age at the time widely believed to be one of irreversible decline. Drawing on a decade of research, including work with medieval manuscripts, it analyzes a set of texts-eight Mirrors-that recount the past in an effort to order the world around them. They confront rebellions, civil war, "China," attempted invasions, and even the fracturing of the court into two lines. To interrogate the significance for medieval writers of narrating such pasts as a Mirror, Erin Brightwell traces a series of innovations across these and related texts that emerge in the face of disorder. In so doing, she uncovers how a dynamic web of evolving concepts of time, place, language use, and cosmological forces was deployed to order the past in an age of unprecedented social movement and upheaval. Despite the Mirrors' common concerns and commitments, traditional linguistic and disciplinary boundaries have downplayed or obscured their significance for medieval thinkers. Through their treatment here as a multilingual, multi-structured genre, the Mirrors are revealed, however, as the dominant mode for reading and writing the past over almost three centuries of Japanese history"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

New reflections : refuge in the past during the final age

Deviant by design : multilingual writing in postwar Medieval Japan

Containing China : the continent as medieval object of knowledge

Moving mirrors : ordering the past in the wake of the Mongols

Memories of mirrors : nostalgia for a unified realm

Epilogue : mirror legacies for early modern Japan.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780674247819

0674247817

OCLC:

1138996712