Crab pincers, pruned fingers, and other pseudonymous slights of hand: Reconstructing authorial identities and communities of reception from the writings of Ueda Akinari (1734--1809)

Material practices of authorial designation and attribution in early modern Japanese fiction, although given corollary treatment in several recent studies of major authors and their work, have received limited critical attention in their own right. Awaiting a systematic study of these practices is a preponderance of paratextual material---including title pages, frontispieces, forewords, prefaces, postscripts, and other types of front and back matter---that testify to the increasingly prevalent use of pseudonyms and discourses about authorship from the Genroku period (1688-1703) onward. While decidedly narrower in scope, this study proceeds from the basic premise that the emergence of discursive conventions for attributing works to named authors (even if, as was often the case, this name was a fictive pseudonym) marked a revolutionary development in the production, consumption, and reception of literary texts in early modern Japan. Names bespoke a newly conferred status on the author, both as a recognized agent in the production of texts and as a guarantor of cultural value in the marketplace.;In this study, I propose making a heuristic distinction between "author" and the discrete authorial subjectivities signified and reified by pseudonyms, and applying this distinction to a study of literary texts by organizing examinations of texts around the pseudonymous figures to which they are attributed. In the case of Ueda Akinari (1734-1809), I demonstrate how this approach can enable us to work outside a rigid framework of critical assumptions in Akinari studies, which conventionally proceed from a notion of the author as the historical Akinari or else from Akinari as a canonical construct. In each chapter, which is incidentally conceived as an individual study of works produced under a single pseudonym, I use pseudonyms as a lens for examining works that have been largely ignored in Akinari studies, and try to place the circumstances of their production within specific social, historical, and discursive contexts, rather than simply the contexts of Akinari's life or his canonical legacy. In the end, I propose that this approach can contribute to both a more informed understanding of the texts in question, as well as an understanding of the diverse modalities of cultural production in early modern Japan in general.