Literary evolution in the country of eight islands: Towards a Darwinian understanding of later Japanese narrative

My dissertation can be divided into six major parts. The introduction serves to lay out Stephen Jay Gould's revisions of traditional Darwinian theory on the levels of scope, efficacy and agency; introduce the dualist system of literary development outlined by Franco Moretti (literary history is the interweaving of two wholly independent paths: un-oriented variation as well as directed and directing selection); and appropriate the semiotic rectangle (thought by Frederick Jameson to be an engine of literary production) as the most basic mechanism of selection for long-form narrative. The prologue then uses these methodological insights to analyze one of the most popular late medieval (1333--1600) narratives and its early modern (1600--1868) offshoots. The first chapter focuses on developments in narrative literature and the commercial print industry over the first fifty years of the seventeenth century, arguing that the two phenomena were independent entities over this period. In addition, this chapter touches on the ability of narrative structures to assume new functions as historical and ideological environments change and posits that, although development happens within structures, fortuitous events do occur and can lead to great structural change. The next chapter is centered on the second half of the seventeenth century, a period during which xylographic print reproduction came to assert an important influence on literary evolution. This section argues that text and genre are the agents of evolution and offers a new way of understanding the differences between thread narrative and long-form fiction based on their differing temporal structures. The third chapter discusses the human feelings-correct principles dynamic that served as the basic mechanism of selection for long-form fiction within the early modern period. It posits that, because it was a conflict born of circumstantial factors as opposed to logical irreconcilability, the quality of compromise that marks the modern novel is nowhere to be found, for compromise is itself weak and can only flourish in an environment dominated by a categorical conflict. An extended epilogue closes the dissertation by putting forward a theory linking the rise of the compromised and compromising hero typical of the novel form with the conflict between individuality and socialization that forms the most major fault line within bourgeois capitalist ideology.