Abstract
Hisayasu Nakagawa : The birth of modern autobiography in Japan. At the beginning of the 18th Century Japan produced its first modern literary autobiography, Oritaku-Shiba-no-Ki (Memoirs of my Life), written by Hakuseki Arai, a high-ranking official in the then Tokugawa Shogunate government. Japanese society of the 18th Century shows a striking similarity with French society in that it was characterised by growing secularisation and "embourgeoisement" ; this resulted in political and economic crises and a series of reforms enacted by the government in an attempt to overcome them. Through an analysis of this work, this article reveals the author as an enlightened rationalist, a type which emerged for the first time in Japanese literary history, in contrast with the French philosophes.
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