A dialogue between past and present: The fiction of Higuchi Ichiyo (1872--1896).

This dissertation is a study of how Higuchi Ichiyo (1872--96), a pioneering modern woman writer, mobilizes the literary past in order to engage in social critique. Ichiyo frequently appropriates the literary motifs, tropes, and narrative paradigms of her forebears. By using the theoretical concept of intertextuality in order to read Ichiyo's texts simultaneously on the literary and social levels, this dissertation asserts that Ichiyo gestures toward traditional literature in response to certain social conditions in her own time, a possibility so far unexamined in scholarship on her writings. The first chapter provides a critical overview of the major competing theories of intertextuality, with special emphasis on Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogism, which is best viewed as an effort to situate literary texts in a social field. The remainder of the dissertation makes use of this theoretical framework in order to produce readings of several of Ichiyo's most well-known works: Otsugomori (On the Last Day of the Year, 1894), Takekurabe (Child's Play, 1895--96), Nigorie (Troubled Waters, 1895), and Wakaremichi (Separate Ways, 1896). Each chapter establishes intertextual connections between Ichiyo's short fiction and a variety of literary and social discourses. I argue that in each of these texts Ichiyo turns to the Japanese literary heritage as part of a concerted effort to critique modernity, especially as it relates to the modern system of prostitution, the commodification of work and of social relations generally, and the gender and class hierarchies that support the emergent ideology of social ambition.Ph.D.Asian literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/128833/2/3029449.pd