Diaries and Letters in Japan and Britain : A Comparative Study
スポンサーリンク
概要
- 論文の詳細を見る
Diaries and letters are types of writing subsumed under the broad 'biographical' genre of literature, which also includes memoirs and 'confessions' and which is, itself, a branch of history. Of course, we cannot describe all such apparently personal writings as 'literature'. Countless and 'nameless' men and women of all ages and of every nationality have jotted down thoughts and ideas in one or all these forms. Some of these writers have anticipated the eventual publication of their efforts; others have never contemplated - let alone desired - that these apparently private writings might someday enter the public realm. Different social and cultural conditions have nurtured the cultivation of diary and letter writing. The earliest flowering of the literary diary, for example, occurred in Japan in the 'Heian period' (794-1192), considered the classical period of Japanese literature, an era which gave birth not only to Japan's finest novel, Genji Monogatari, but also witnessed another important development of Japanese prose in the form of Japanese court women's memoirs or 'nikki'. The tradition of diary-writing in Britain dates from the seventeenth century, some five hundred years after the blossoming of this literary form in Japan. By the eighteenth century, journal, diary and letter-writing were all commonplace in Britain, and they were closely related rhetorical activities. While diary-writing in Japan achieved its finest expression in the classic works penned by the court-ladies of its Heian period, in Britain, the diary as literature continued to develop as a rich, diversifying, expanding heritage, its influence evident from the seventeenth-century up to the present day not only in the continuing popularity of published diaries and letters and journals, in memoirs, autobiographies and biographies, but also in epistolary novels or in other fictional works couched in the popular journal or diary forms. Of course, books of modern diaries and letters, both 'actual' and fictional, also exist in Japan, but their number is scarce, particularly when contrasted to their abundance in Britain. In a typical Japanese library, one may find many books devoted to epistolary technique - the sort of letter-writer manuals popular in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Britain - but few collections of the correspondence of famous writers or artists, politicians or statesmen popular in modern Britain. It may be that modern Japan's obsession with 'rules' and correctness, propriety and modesty has lain the deadening hand of convention even on letter and diary-writing.
- 四国学院大学の論文
- 2003-03-12
著者
関連論文
- The Garden and the City in Eighteenth-century Japan and England
- Diaries and Letters in Japan and Britain : A Comparative Study