Kanbunmyaku: The Literary Sinitic Context and the Birth of Modern Japanese Language and Literature

In Kanbunmyaku: The Literary Sinitic Context and the Birth of Modern Japanese Language and Literature, Saito Mareshi demonstrates the centrality of Literary Sinitic poetry and prose in the creation of modern literary Japanese. Saito’s new understanding of the role of ＂kanbunmyaku＂ in the formation of Japanese literary modernity challenges dominant narratives tied to translations from modern Western literatures and problematizes the antagonism between Literary Sinitic and Japanese in the modern academy. Saito shows how kundoku (vernacular reading) and its rhythms were central to the rise of new inscriptional styles, charts the changing relationship of modern poets and novelists to kanbunmyaku, and concludes that the chronotope of modern Japan was based in a language world supported by the Literary Sinitic Context.

Saito Mareshi is Professor at the University of Tokyo. Trained at the University of Kyoto, he specializes in premodern Sinitic literature, the history of the sinographic tradition in Japan, and the role of sinographs and Literary Sinitic in modernizing East Asia.
Ross King earned his PhD in Linguistics at Harvard University, and specializes in the history of language, reading, writing and literary cultures in the sinographic sphere, with a focus on Korea in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Christina Laffin received her PhD in premodern Japanese literature at Columbia University, and specializes in premodern Japanese literature with a focus on women’s writing, travel diaries, and the sociohistorical contexts for women’s education, socialization, and literacy.