CEAPS/EALC Speaker | Gergana Ivanova, "The Many Lives of a Japanese Classic: Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book"

The large corpus of literary works by accomplished and highly educated women writers that emerged during the Heian period (794–1185) in Japan played an important role in the creation of a national literary tradition. Despite their seeming timelessness, these texts have elicited severe criticism and received intense praise over the centuries. Although written over a thousand years ago, they continue to inform contemporary cultural production.
This talk considers the fixed images of Japanese women writers of the distant past and the constructed nature of their literary works. Focusing on one text, The Pillow Book (Makura no sōshi, early eleventh c.), it examines interpretations of the work and images of its author Sei Shōnagon (964?–after 1027) that emerged in the years between the seventeenth and the early twentieth century. Ivanova shows that although these views of the literary work and its author were not shaped through references to historical documents and direct interactions with Sei Shōnagon’s writing, they still linger in contemporary scholarship and popular culture.