Before the World: Kaga No Chiyo & the Rustic-feminine Margins of Japanese Haiku

This dissertation tracks the transformation of the merchant-class female poet, Kaga no Chiyo, from a minor supplementary position as a collected feminine object to an interlocutor and exemplar of post-Bashō poetics in regional circulation. I argue that discourses on the fall of haikai poetry among eighteenth-century male practitioners, combined with the rise of an eccentric bunjin “literati”) consciousness, led to a pattern of rural male poets collecting women as casual supplements to masculine-coded poetic communities, part of a larger valorization of a poetics of simplicity and lightness. Chiyo’s early encounters with male collectors delimited the value of her work to an unrevised, spontaneous simplicity, a simplicity she was actively discouraged from honing. Yet Chiyo acted against this advice, instead drawing on three forms of poetic sociality (travel, correspondence, and preface-writing) to enact a nested bunjin subjectification, ultimately subverting both state and subcultural discourses through a nuanced poetics of eccentric marginality. By 1774, she had cultivated a female bunjin identity that transcended well beyond her initially prescribed role, becoming one of the genre’s most notable figures in two key related capacities: first, she became a widely acknowledged representative of women poets of the Bashō legacy, acting as interlocutor for both sides of the mid-century Bashō Revival movement. Second, she authored a collection of poetic art objects that circulated beyond the borders of Tokugawa Japan to the Korean Peninsula in 1764, which was subsequently read by domestic readers as further evidence of her significance as a haikai figure. Furthermore, when viewed within a larger East Asian literati context, I argue that Chiyo’s Joseon collection can be read as the manifestation of a local aesthetic with regional complementarity, a phenomenon which foreshadows haiku as national-linguistic representative of Japan in world literature.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Department of Comparative Literature

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Oregon

Year dc:date.issued

2021

Author dc:creator

• Crowson, Michelle

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Walley, Glynne

Statement dc:rights

• All Rights Reserved.

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1794/26201

OAI record oai:identifier

https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/server/oai/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=dim&identifier=oai%3Ascholarsbank.uoregon.edu%3A1794%2F26201