Poetry, culture, and social harmony in eighteenth-century Japanese literary thought: The Sorai school and its critics

This dissertation explores how in eighteenth-century Japan the study and composition of poetry---specifically classical forms of poetry in both Chinese and Japanese---was seen as a means to a well-governed and ethical society. The main figures treated in this study are the Confucian scholar Ogyu Sorai (1666--1728), his disciples Dazai Shundai (1680--1747) and Hattori Nankaku (1683--1759), and the kokugaku ("nativist learning") scholars Kamo no Mabuchi (1697--1769) and Motoori Norinaga (1730--1801), who were both critical of the Sorai school.; Sorai believed Confucianism should be understood as a cultural inheritance from ancient China that contains the tools and techniques necessary to govern society. One of these tools is poetry, which he saw as a way for rulers to gain insight into human emotionality, a precondition for humane governance. Shundai had a similar view of poetry, but Nankaku departed from Sorai by seeing poetry as something to be pursued for its own sake. This in turn entailed a more general shift in the idea of the function of culture, toward seeing it not as a means to govern society but as a way to elevate oneself into a sphere of elegance that exists apart from society. Finally, both Mabuchi and Norinaga saw Japanese poetry as socially beneficial, but they saw it less as a tool for rulership than as a means to a distinctly Japanese form of harmonious social organization, which they contrasted with the Chinese culture championed by the Sorai school.; This study describes all the figures it discusses---including the nominally anti-Confucian Mabuchi and Norinaga---as working within Confucian discourses of the role of poetry in society. It questions the common view that the Sorai school and nativist learning offer a liberating stance toward emotionality, and instead looks at how the new ways they positively value emotionality are related to new ways of socializing emotions. Such an approach provides a more complex and ambiguous picture of literary thought in eighteenth-century Japan, showing how a new focus on the importance and autonomy of literary expression was at the same time associated with the foreclosure of certain possibilities for political action.