Okazaki Tōmitsu: Germany, the Man’yōshū and World Literature
Auteurs
The little-known Okazaki Tōmitsu (1869-1912) left very few traces in the history of Meiji literature, although he is, by all account, the first man to ever write a history of Japanese literature in a Western language, (his Geschichte der japanischen Nationalliteratur, written in German). Convinced as he was that Japanese literature was condemned to be misrepresented in books written by Westerners, he took it upon himself to elaborate what he deemed to be a fair account, which, he thought, was the necessary precondition to allow Japanese literature to take its rightful place within “world literature” (Weltliteratur). The aim of this paper is to situate Okazaki’s endeavour within the current of the 1890s literary history, especially in relation with the revalorisation of the Man’yōshū (to which Okazaki dedicated his doctoral thesis, also written in German, at the University of Leipzig), which comes to be viewed as the first monument of a properly “national” literature and which is used, in Okazaki’s writings, as the model for all posterior literature.
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