‘Literary Heritage’ and ‘Character’：On the Development and the Presentness of the Image of the Classics

Abstract

In this paper, I analyze the cultural contents of Japanese Classics and their images with adapting the two key terms ‘character’ and ‘literary heritage’, both of which I have become interested in recently. I co-edited Volume 4 of the five volumes’ handbook Nichibunken Popular Culture Research Series (2020-2021), The Popular Culture of ‘Characters’：Tradition, Performing Arts, Worlds. In the preface of that book, I wrote on ‘The Popular Culture History of “Characters” and “Worlds”’, where I re-examined the key concept of “characters”. In other academic context, I studied the concepts of ‘cultural heritage’ and ‘textual heritage’ in some joint researches, with a particular focus on ‘literary heritage’. By introducing and adopting both these key terms, here I attempt to analyze the development and the presentness of the classic image and its cultural contents in premodern Japanese literature. As some examples of the above, I shed the light on The Tale of Genji, The Tale of Heike and the work of the poet Bashō in order to identify their relationship with their surrounding literary heritage. As a result, and by reconstructing the concept of ‘readers’, I outline the imaging and development of Japanese classic literature and its modernity.