Blurred boundaries: narrativity and fictionality in Edo-period prose literature

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements The papers included in this issue are a selection of those first presented at the workshop entitled ‘Narrative, Narrativehood, Narrativity and Nonnarrative in Japanese Prose of the Edo Period’ organized at the end of May 2007 at Università Pontificia Salesiana in Rome, where a considerable body of Japanese rare books of the Edo period are held in the so-called Marega Collection. I would like to thank all the scholars – namely Stephan Köhn, Peter Kornicki, Lawrence Marceau, Joshua Mostow, Paul Schalow, Marcia Yonemoto, Guita Winkel, Haruo Shirane and Nagashima Hiroaki – who took part in the intense three-day workshop, offering well-researched and inspiring contributions as well as enthusiastically discussing the issues raised in each presentation. My deepest gratitude goes to Marie-Laure Ryan who, from the beginning, was eager to undertake this challenging dialogue between literary theory and Japanese studies and to Nagashima Hiroaki who led the round-table discussion which took place on the last day. My special thanks go to Peter Kornicki who made all this possible through his zealous support of the project from its conception and through his constant help in all stages of the workshop and of this publication. Last but not least, I thank all the contributors to this issue for the hard work undertaken and the patience shown during the long process which has been necessary in order to give material shape to our intellectual project. I hope that this special issue will inspire more studies of the hybrid and fluid texts that make up the great unread of Edo-period prose literature and that the participants in this project will be able to work together again in the near future in order to dig out other forgotten aesthetics of the Edo period. Laura Moretti is a full-time Lecturer at the Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia. She has published in Japanese various critical editions of prose texts of the seventeenth century (including Chikusai ryōji no hyōban, Hyō, Fushinseki and Bokusai banashi) and the Italian translation of the woodblock edition of Chikusai (2003). Her current research focuses on popular prose literature produced in the Kamigata region during the seventeenth century and aims to analyse the features that characterize this literature once it is put into print, as well as to detect the genre consciousness that existed at the time. Her research interests also embrace the issue of intertextuality and the relationship between manuscripts and printed texts in the Edo period. She can be contacted at: lmoretti@unive.it or lmoretti@hotmail.com.