Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Utamakura, Allusion, and Intertextuality in Traditional Japanese Poetry

Utamakura, Allusion, and Intertextuality in Traditional Japanese Poetry

Kamens, Edward
Skelton, Raleigh A.
Bridia, C. de

Hardcover

Poetry CriticismGeneral Poetry

ISBN10: 0300068085
ISBN13: 9780300068085
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: Jan 24 1996
Pages: 336
Weight: 1.51
Height: 0.96 Width: 6.37 Depth: 9.47
Language: English
A central feature of traditional Japanese poetry (waka) is the use of utamakura--a category of poetic words, many of which are place-names or the names of features associated with them--to cultivate allusion and intertextuality between individual poems and within the tradition. In this book Edward Kamens analyzes a wide selection of poems to show how utamakura came to wield special powers within Japanese poetry. He reveals how poets in generation after generation returned, either in person or in imagination, to these places and to poems about them to encounter again the forms, styles, and techniques of their forebears, and to discover ways to create new poems of their own.

Kamens focuses especially on one figure, the buried tree, which refers to fossilized wood associated in particular with an utamakura site, the Natori River, and is mentioned in poems that first appear in anthologies in the early tenth century. The figure surfaces again at many points in the history of traditional Japanese poetry, as do the buried trees themselves in the shallow waters that otherwise conceal them. After explaining and discussing the literary history of the concept of utamakura, Kamens traces the allusive and intertextual development of the figure of the buried tree and the use of the place-name Natorigawa in waka poetry through the late nineteenth century. He investigates the relation between utamakura and the collecting of fetishes and curios associated with utamakura sites by waka connoisseurs. And he analyzes in detail the use of utamakura and their pictorial representations in a political and religious program in an architectural setting--the Saishoshitennoin program of 1207.

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