The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction - by William C Hedberg (Hardcover)

About the Book

In The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction, William C. Hedberg investigates the reception of The Water Margin in a variety of early modern and modern Japanese contexts, from eighteenth-century Confucian scholarship and literary exegesis to early twentieth-century colonial ethnography.

Book Synopsis

The classic Chinese novel The Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan) tells the story of a band of outlaws in twelfth-century China and their insurrection against the corrupt imperial court. Imported into Japan in the early seventeenth century, it became a ubiquitous source of inspiration for translations, adaptations, parodies, and illustrated woodblock prints. There is no work of Chinese fiction more important to both the development of early modern Japanese literature and the Japanese imagination of China than The Water Margin.

In The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction, William C. Hedberg investigates the reception of The Water Margin in a variety of early modern and modern Japanese contexts, from eighteenth-century Confucian scholarship and literary exegesis to early twentieth-century colonial ethnography. He examines the ways Japanese interest in Chinese texts contributed to new ideas about literary canons and national character. By constructing an account of Japanese literature through the lens of The Water Margin's literary afterlives, Hedberg offers an alternative history of East Asian textual culture: one that focuses on the transregional dimensions of Japanese literary history and helps us rethink the definition and boundaries of Japanese literature itself.

Review Quotes

Hedberg's book stands out as a model of historically-informed transregional research that... participants in any type of humanities research can only hope to emulate.-- "Japan Review"

The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction is a first-rate work of scholarship that makes innovative and important contributions to the field of East Asian studies by crossing geographical borders between Japan and China, temporal borders between the Tokugawa and Meiji eras, and disciplinary borders between literature and history. Hedberg deserves high marks for navigating those conceptual margins as deftly as he interprets the margins of Shuihu zhuan.--Erik Esselstrom, University of Vermont "Journal of Japanese Studies"

Meticulously researched and written with clarity and wit, this is literary historiography at its best and most illuminating. . . Essential.-- "Choice"

William C. Hedberg argues convincingly for The Water Margin's centrality to early modern and modern Japanese and Chinese literature. And like its subject, The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction moves across national, linguistic, temporal, and generic boundaries with energy and eloquence.--Glynne Walley, author of Good Dogs: Edification, Entertainment, and Kyokutei Bakin's Nansō Satomi hakkenden

The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction manages to be scholarly, witty, engaging, and personable all at the same time--a rare combination for a subject that is so dense and requires such intimate knowledge of a premodern literary text and the complex scholarly debates that surrounded it.--Pieter Keulemans, author of Sound Rising from the Paper: Nineteenth-Century Martial Arts Fiction and the Chinese Acoustic Imagination

Concise, thoughtfully structured, and meticulously researched, The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction is one of those rare books that opens up a bracingly new perspective on a well established field of study. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the literary history of Japan from the seventeenth century into the first decades of the twentieth, or in rediscovering "the literary history of Japan" itself as a concept.--Michael Emmerich, author of The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature

Remarkable in its breadth, The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction illuminates how Japanese encounters with successive renditions of The Water Margin over more than three centuries served to inspire radical rethinking about 'Chineseness' and 'Japaneseness' across cultural, literary, and political registers. Hedberg especially handles the textual and linguistic complexities with expert skill.--Paul Gordon Schalow, author of A Poetics of Courtly Male Friendship in Heian Japan

In this erudite and sophisticated account of the Japanese appropriation of The Water Margin, Hedberg probes a series of compelling examples and raises important questions about the nature of texts, commentaries, and literary history. This excellent work embraces the marginal as a powerful hermeneutical tool to destabilize received views.--Laura Moretti, author of Recasting the Past: An Early Modern Tales of Ise for Children

About the Author

William C. Hedberg is an assistant professor of Japanese literature at Arizona State University.