Papers by Peter F Kornicki
BRILL eBooks, 2016
© peter kornicki, ���6 | doi ��.��63/97890043�6�56_006 This is an open access chapter distributed... more © peter kornicki, ���6 | doi ��.��63/97890043�6�56_006 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0. Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) License.
Fully revised in August 2024.
Ecologies of Translation in East and South East Asia, 1600-1900
This ground-breaking volume on early modern inter-Asian translation examines how translation from... more This ground-breaking volume on early modern inter-Asian translation examines how translation from plain Chinese was situated at the nexus between, on the one hand, the traditional standard of biliteracy characteristic of literary practices in the Sinographic sphere, and on the other, practices of translational multilingualism (competence in multiple spoken languages to produce a fully localized target text). Translations from plain Chinese are shown to carve out new ecologies of translations that not only enrich our understanding of early modern translation practices across the Sinographic sphere, but also demonstrate that the transregional uses of a non-alphabetic graphic technology call for different models of translation theory.
Unbinding The Pillow Book, 2018
Spectacular Accumulation, 2015
In Spectacular Accumulation , Morgan Pitelka investigates the significance of material culture an... more In Spectacular Accumulation , Morgan Pitelka investigates the significance of material culture and sociability in late sixteenth-century Japan, focusing in particular on the career and afterlife of Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616), the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate. The story of Ieyasu illustrates the close ties between people, things, and politics and offers us insight into the role of material culture in the shift from medieval to early modern Japan and in shaping our knowledge of history. This innovative and eloquent history of a transitional age in Japan reframes the relationship between culture and politics. Like the collection of meibutsu, or ""famous objects,"" exchanging hostages, collecting heads, and commanding massive armies were part of a strategy Pitelka calls """"spectacular accumulation,"""" which profoundly affected the creation and character of Japan's early modern polity. Pitelka uses the notion of spectacular accumulation to contextualize the acquisition of """"art"""" within a larger complex of practices aimed at establishing governmental authority, demonstrating military dominance, reifying hierarchy, and advertising wealth. He avoids the artificial distinction between cultural history and political history, arguing that the famed cultural efflorescence of these years was not subsidiary to the landscape of political conflict, but constitutive of it. Employing a wide range of thoroughly researched visual and material evidence, including letters, diaries, historical chronicles, and art, Pitelka links the increasing violence of civil and international war to the increasing importance of samurai social rituals and cultural practices. Moving from the Ashikaga palaces of Kyoto to the tea utensil collections of Ieyasu, from the exchange of military hostages to the gift-giving rituals of Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Spectacular Accumulation traces Japanese military rulers' power plays over famous artworks as well as objectified human bodies.
The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature
This is a fully updated (as of 19 March 2024) version of my history bibliographies. Some kind peo... more This is a fully updated (as of 19 March 2024) version of my history bibliographies. Some kind people noticed omissions so I have added them and reuploaded.
Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits, Vol. VII, 2010
Japanese Studies in Britain, 2016
British Royal and Japanese Imperial Relations, 1868-2018, 2019
This new scholarly study examines the history of the relations between the British and Japanese m... more This new scholarly study examines the history of the relations between the British and Japanese monarchies over the past 150 years. Complemented by a significant plate section which includes a number of rarely seen images, as well as a chronology of royal/imperial visits and extensive bibliography, British Royal and Japanese Imperial Relations, 1868-2018 will become a benchmark reference on the subject. The volume is divided into three sections. Part I, by Peter Kornicki, examines the 'royals and imperials' history during the Meiji era; Part II, by Antony Best, examines the first half of the twentieth century; and Part III, by Sir Hugh Cortazzi, focuses on the post-war history up to the present day. Published in association with the Japan Society, its appearance marks the abdication of Emperor Akihito and the enthronement of Crown Prince Naruhito in May 2019. It is also a memorial volume to the late Sir Hugh Cortazzi who died in August 2018, shortly after completing his own ...
International Journal of Asian Studies, 2009
Chinese conduct books for women were read throughout East Asia, but because Chinese was considere... more Chinese conduct books for women were read throughout East Asia, but because Chinese was considered too difficult for women in Japan, Korea and Vietnam, vernacular editions often were prepared in order to make the message more accessible. In this article we present a bibliographic study of surviving conduct books for Vietnamese women, both in Chinese and in Vietnamese, and in manuscript and printed forms, and consider the production of such texts in the light of conduct literature for women produced in Korea and Japan. A particularly interesting case isLesser learning for women, a hybrid book combining a Ming-dynasty didactic text in Chinese with other didactic materials in Vietnamese. For the most part, these various conduct books for women purvey unchanging moral certainties and restrictions for women, and as such were increasingly at odds with the changing world of colonial Vietnam in which educational opportunities for women were growing.
Journal of Japanese Studies, 2021
都の錦『風流源氏物語』 梅翁『若草源氏物語』 梅翁『雛鶴源氏物語』 梅翁『紅白源氏物語』 梅翁『俗解源氏物語』 論考篇（江戸時代における俗語訳の意義；女性にふさわしくない本？—１７世紀後半の日本... more 都の錦『風流源氏物語』 梅翁『若草源氏物語』 梅翁『雛鶴源氏物語』 梅翁『紅白源氏物語』 梅翁『俗解源氏物語』 論考篇（江戸時代における俗語訳の意義；女性にふさわしくない本？—１７世紀後半の日本における『源氏物語』と『伊勢物語』；テクストの改善；梅翁／奥村政信『源氏物語』の挿絵とテクスト）
Oxford Scholarship Online
Chinese texts travelled in extraordinary quantities to distant parts of East Asia, and this chapt... more Chinese texts travelled in extraordinary quantities to distant parts of East Asia, and this chapter charts the movements of books. Most of the movement was centripetal, from China to neighbouring societies, and rather than being foisted on neighbouring societies Chinese books were instead actively sought and taken home by envoys, monks, and other travellers. The flow of books continued right up to the middle of the nineteenth century, when Chinese accounts of the Opium War and of the power of Western countries reached Japan and Korea. Small numbers of books were taken from neighbouring societies to China or to other neighbouring societies, the most important case being the seizure of many books from Korea by the Japanese forces which invaded the Korean peninsula in the last decade of the sixteenth century. For the most part, though, East Asian societies apart from China were receivers rather than transmitters.
Oxford Scholarship Online, 2018
This chapter focuses on the language rupture in East Asia, that is to say, the loss of the common... more This chapter focuses on the language rupture in East Asia, that is to say, the loss of the common written language known as literary Chinese or Sinitic. The gradual replacement of the cosmopolitan language Sinitic by the written vernaculars was a process similar in some ways to the replacement of Latin and Sanskrit by the European and South Asian vernaculars, as argued by Sheldon Pollock. However, Sinitic was not a spoken language, so the oral dimension of vernacularization cannot be ignored. Charles Ferguson’s notion of diglossia has been much discussed, but the problem in the context of East Asia is that the only spoken languages were the vernaculars and that Sinitic was capable of being read in any dialect of Chinese as well as in the vernaculars used in neighbouring societies.
East Asian Publishing and Society, 2021
Oxford Scholarship Online, 2018
This book is a wide-ranging study of vernacularization in East Asia, and for this purpose East As... more This book is a wide-ranging study of vernacularization in East Asia, and for this purpose East Asia includes not only China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam but also other societies that no longer exist, such as the Tangut and Khitan empires. It takes the reader from the early centuries of the Common Era, when the Chinese script was the only form of writing and Chinese Buddhist, Confucian, and medical texts spread throughout East Asia, through the centuries when vernacular scripts evolved, right up to the end of the nineteenth century when nationalism created new roles for vernacular languages and vernacular scripts. Through an examination of oral approaches to Chinese texts, it shows how highly valued Chinese texts came to be read through the prism of the vernaculars and ultimately to be translated. This long process has some parallels with vernacularization in Europe, but a crucial difference is that literary Chinese was, unlike Latin, not a spoken language. As a consequence, people who...
Revue d'Histoire des Textes, 2008
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Papers by Peter F Kornicki