The Center for Asian Studies is pleased to invite you to the following event:
Imagining China in Medieval Japan: The Case of Fujiwara no Teika
Thursday, April 25 at 5:00pm
Humanities 250, CU-Boulder campus
A lecture by Paul Atkins, Associate Professor and Associate Department Chair, Department of Asian Languages & Literature, University of Washington. For writers, clerics, officials, and others living in Japan around the turn of the thirteenth century, China—which they referred to using multiple dynastic names of the past and contemporary present—functioned simultaneously as the matrix of a shared regional culture and as a contrastive background against which patterns of Japanese cultural formation could be discerned. This lecture will discuss the imagining of contemporary and ancient China in various works written by the influential Japanese poet and courtier Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241), including his kambun diary, Meigetsuki, and the Tale of Matsura, a pseudo-historical poetic narrative written in Japanese and set in Tang China.