Traces of Dreams Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho [Hardcover]

Basho (1644-94) is perhaps the best known Japanese poet in both Japan and the West, and yet there has been remarkably little serious scholarship in English on his achievement. This book is intended to address that virtual void by establishing the ground for critical discussion and reading of a central figure in Japanese culture, placing the works of Basho and his disciples in the context of broader social change.Intended for both the general reader and the specialist,Traces of Dreamsexamines the issues of language, landscape, cultural memory, and social practice in early modern Japan through a fundamental reassessment ofhaikaipopular linked verse that eventually gave birth to modernhaikuparticularly that of Basho and his disciples.The author analyzes haikai not only as a specific poetic genre but as a mode of discourse that emerged from the profound engagement between the new commoner culture that came to the fore in the seventeenth century citiesandthe earlier traditions, which haikai parodied, transformed, and translated into the vernacular.Traces of Dreamsexplores the manner in which haikai both appropriated and recast the established cultural and poetic associations embodied in nature, historical objects, and famous placesthe landscape that preserved the cultural memory and that became the source of authority as well as the contested ground for haikai re-visioning and re-mapping.Basho (1644-94) is perhaps the best known Japanese poet in both Japan and the West, and this book establishes the ground for badly needed critical discussion of this critical figure by placing the works of Basho and his disciples in the context of broader social change.