Negotiating publicity, publicising domesticity: women-authored Heian kana memoirs, circulation, reception, and power

I examine the evolution of the socio-literary image of female middle-ranking producers of text in the late Heian period, and how it was informed by different understandings of domesticity and its interplay with the public sphere—both in these authors’ work and in later re-contextualisations; discussing relations between these writers and higher ranking patrons/husbands, the negotiation of loss of control over textual production and public persona, and it contemplates questions of patronage, forced circulation, and intertextuality. In order to do so, it focuses primarily on the power dynamics underlying the portrayal and significance of domestic and household-centred literary circulation in women-authored texts and others that exemplify their reception; addressing firstly, the different ways in which household and court-based kana nikki 仮名日記 (diary, memoir) authors conceptualise domesticity and their position within it as a tool to articulate their relation to broader society, and secondly, how they respond and negotiate around this conception. This thesis presents a comparative approach to different modes of authorship, dynamics of patronage, questions of publicity, the circulation of women-authored texts, and their relation with the sphere of domesticity; and finds itself in the intersection between premodern literature and Queer studies.