Reading between the lines: Poetry and politics in the imperial anthologies of the late Kamakura period (1185--1333)

Literary anthologies influence what, whom, and how we read.{09}The act of anthologization affects issues of canon formation, literary history, and the relationship between institutions and cultural production.{09}This study examines five anthologies of Japanese poetry commissioned by imperial patrons ( chokusenwakashu) at the end of the Kamakura period (1185--1333) and addresses the nexus of poetry and politics that animated the compilation and preservation of these collections that stand at the center of the Japanese literary canon. These poetry anthologies were formal undertakings of the imperial court and often compiled in times of political instability, functioning on a variety of practical and symbolic levels. This dissertation assesses the extra-literary impulses that propelled and informed the making of these anthologies and considers how these anthologies captured the attention of contemporary circles and contained the power to inscribe political authority and literary legitimacy.; For more than half a millennium, waka and the imperial anthologies mattered a great deal, but poetry alone cannot account for this longevity. Although the content of the poetry and developments of style were, by and large, apolitical, the writing, collecting, and preserving of this poetry was innately, if not explicitly, political. I argue that these anthologies were undertaken, especially in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in times of political crisis, because contemporary elites recognized the enterprise to be a vehicle for the inscription of cultural and political authority. My research concludes that in the case of the imperial anthologies, and Japanese poetry more generally, it is anachronistic to separate literary prestige and value from imperial legitimacy and power.; This study is organized as a chronological survey of the five imperial anthologies compiled in the last decades of the Kamakura period: ShokuShuishu (1276), ShinGosenshu (1301), Gyokuyoshu (1311), ShokuSenzaishu (1318), and ShokuGoShuishu (1323). These anthologies have not received the attention they deserve, and it is my contention that this lack of attention largely stems from 20th-century notions of poetic value and a general tendency to discount considerations of political or practical matters in discussions of the most prestigious endeavor of the poetic tradition.