Neither Plagiarism nor Patchwork: The Culture of Citation and the Making of Authorship in Medieval Japanese Poetry

Abstract:This article examines the connections between author, oeuvre, and institutions as reflected in the discourse of intellectual ownership from the late twelfth to the early sixteenth century. I address the issue by reconstructing the genealogies of authorship and "copyright" in literary treatises and by investigating a controversial poem in Ungyoku waka shō, a hitherto overlooked poetry collection dating from 1514. By unveiling how premodern authors represented themselves and their peers by means of literary reappropriation, I illustrate the intertextual and intersubjective trajectories that embodied these politics of authorship.