Literary reactions to the 'cult of facts' in Mori Ogai and Virginia Woolf (Japan)

My dissertation is a comparative study of how Mori Ōgai (1862–1922) and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) reacted to existing historical writing as writers of literature. I argue that their approaches to historical discourse can be best understood as those of “amateur historians,” and in this dissertation I read their biographical and historical works in the context of the rise of professional history and the reactions from amateur historians in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. Entering into the contemporary discussions on historiography, Woolf and Ōgai constructed their authorial identities as literary commentators who have a legitimate (if alternative) access to historical truth through their uses of fiction and literary skills. They eventually invented new forms of historical and biographical narrative, broadly conceived, where the tensions between fiction and non-fiction are effectively employed in the authors' search for the past. In particular, I examine Ōgai's use of self-commentaries on his historical fiction and the subsequent invention of the shiden biography as Ōgai's intervention into the rhetoric of annotation in modern Japan. In the case of Virginia Woolf, I focus upon her creative responses to historiographical issues of narrativity in early twentieth century Britain, showing that even her imaginative re-enactment of history was influenced by processes of documentation.; Informed by recent, more nuanced discussions about the nature of historical narrative, this study investigates interactions between literary and historical discourses, two discursive realms that have often been conflated in the past scholarship of Woolf and Ōgai. This study is also an exercise in intercultural comparison, a comparison of texts not based upon influences, translations, or a presumed contiguity of history or culture. Although Ōgai and Woolf wrote independently of each other, similarities between the historical and cultural situations in which these authors found themselves illuminate shared conditions that shaped the configuration of historical discourse in twentieth century Japan and Britain. This comparison of two writers, one from East Asia and one from Europe, tests our theoretical assumptions about the relationship between history and literature beyond the confines of cultural borders, within which such reflections are often limited.