A Stylistic Typology of Kamakura Period Literature

From the Perspective of Predicates

Abstract

In this study, I conducted a stylistic typology of literary works from the Kamakura period, including wabun ‘native-style literature’ and gunki mono ‘war chronicles’, which are considered to be a type of wakan konkōbun ‘Japanese-Chinese hybrid style literature’, based on the properties of sentence predicates and a comparison with the results of Okawa (2020), using correspondence analysis and cluster analysis. As a result, I found that Kamakura period wabun could be divided into two types: 1. standard kikōbun ‘travelogues’ and wakashū ‘waka anthologies’ and 2. wabun and kikōbun and wakashū with strong stylistic features. Gunki mono were grouped together with kanbun kundoku ‘vernacular reading of Literary Sinitic’-inspired literature and diaries, revealing that such chronicles have stylistic characteristics similar to works such as "Konjaku Monogatari-shu" in terms of opposition of wa versus kan, and in terms of genre-related style.