Reflecting the Past : : Place, Language, and Principle in Japan's Medieval Mirror Genre / / Erin L. Brightwell.

• Superior document: Harvard East Asian Monographs ; Volume 433
• VerfasserIn: Brightwell, Erin L., 1973-
• Place / Publishing House: Cambridge, Massachusetts : : Harvard University Asia Center,, [2020]; ©2020
• Year of Publication: 2020
• Edition: First edition.
• Language: English
• Series: Harvard East Asian monographs ; Volume 433.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource.

"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.

Table of 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.