Family Resemblances in East Asian Anthologies

Kamens, Edward B.; Kamens, Edward B.

Tina Lu’s Presidential Theme inspired a CFP on family resemblances in East Asian anthologies, yielding proposals from diverse areas of East Asian literature. There will be four 12-13 minute presentations: on a 6th-7th century CE Chinese poetry anthology; a Japanese collection of literary Sinitic belles-lettres from the 11th century; The Tale of Genji, the great canonical work of narrative fiction (with poems), from the same era, treated as an anthology on the basis of its composite structure; and the early modern Japanese genre of calligraphy albums (tekagami). Each of these texts represents literal families, their workings and works, and the ties that bind them, as biological lineages, as well as virtual families of writings with shared formal features and/or internal citations and allusive gestures to their textual forebears. They also create a sense of “family resemblance” through their thematic or form-based categorical organizations, or by means of the links their makers devise to highlight such relationships, or through internal matrices of allusion and intertext, apparent in the individual anthologized entities themselves and between and among them as well. Thus, each text offers depictions of family “histories”—whether factual or fictional—and the inheritances these families share, whereby their members “mirror” one another; or they construct virtual families of writings bound by shared forms, styles, thematic concerns, and the figural repertories they hold in common, which writers pass to one another across the generations, thus enabling the creation of multigenerational textual lineages.

The presenters are steeped in the literary histories of their respective fields in studies of East Asian traditions, in which family structures and generational inheritances have always been and still are of paramount importance, and where anthologies, as such, hold remarkable, canon-defining prominence; anthologies are the textual entities held as authoritative and selective representations, preservation sites, and transmitters of the most highly valued literary creations in specific genres and the histories thereof. The presenters also engage with current trends in the historicization and theorization of anthologies per se and in the assessment of their roles in canon formation, as information-sharing media, and are aware of the socio-economic factors that have shaped and continue to shape the processes of selection (inclusion and exclusion) of anthology contents and their reception. We understand anthologies as filtered organizers of generative materials and knowledge but also as limited, exclusive containers that can reveal biases and inequities in the societies that produce them. (See eg., N. Fraistat/1987, P. Yu/1990, J. Di Leo/2004, M. Hunter/2021).

Mengling WANG will open the panel with her paper on intrafamily exchange poetry in Yutai xinyong (New Songs from a Jade Terrace), one of the few surviving pre-Tang anthologies of Chinese poetry. She sees the act of anthologization as “a discursive practice of forming social connections among literati” that “became an effective means of constructing literary communities.” Next, Niels van der Salm will show how the content of Honcho monzui, a highly selective anthology of mid-Heian “fine writings” in the elite literary Sinitic prose and prose-poem genres, depicts familial relationships not only on the basis of “consanguinity” but also through other family-like relationships such as master/disciple, thus enabling the collection to define and celebrate specific “literary genealogies.” For heuristic purposes but also on the basis of its composite structure, Ed Kamens will review episodes of recognition of family resemblance that occur across the 54 chapters of The Tale of Genji. These episodes are not only consequential as turns of the extended plot of the multi-generational narrative but also create, for the reader, a sense of a “family” of recurring motifs; notably, these episodes are often the moments chosen for visualization in the long tradition of Genji illustration. This confirms them as “highlights” of the experience that the Tale has offered its readers for more than a millennium. In the final presentation, Mary Gilstad will show how the clustering of specimens in early modern Japanese calligraphy albums (tekagami) create trans-historical communities or virtual families of literary men and women across multiple generations. These albums are not only repositories of fine brush writing but also anthologies of historical figures and their “hands.”

We have opted to forego having a respondent in order to allow maximum time for the time-limited presentations and for discussion and Q&A with those in attendance at the session.

Wang is an assistant professor, van der Salm is a university lecturer, Kamens is a senior (emeritus) scholar, and Gilstad is a 2025 Ph.D. recipient and currently an independent scholar. The group is also diverse in terms of nationality, age, and gender identity.

72 Family Resemblances in East Asian Anthologies: Calls for Papers