As the eminent literary critic Donald Keene noted, the love of travel «runs through Japanese literature from its beginnings to our own day. » Indeed, the very idea of 'travel' permeates a vast amount of literature produced in Japan across a multitude of textual genres. However, modalities of travel as well as of textual production evolved over time in connection to social, political, and economic factors; their intersections therefore generated, and were informed by, different meanings at different historical junctures. While Japanese scholarship has been traditionally characterized by a descriptive and taxonomic approach to the study of travel-related literature, during the last three decades a growing number of Western scholars started to investigate the socio-political aspects of travel in connection with literary production. Continuing well into the present day, this trend makes studies on travel and literature a significant part of the academic discourse about Japan.
This project seeks therefore to investigate the relationship between travel, texts, and socio-political determinants in Japanese literary culture through a number of carefully selected case studies that are historically significant and hitherto largely unexplored. It brings together scholars from Sapienza and from other Italian universities with the support of a Japanese specialist in the sociology of literature. By framing individual investigations of single case studies within a common methodology (i.e. a reading of primary texts grounded in a sound philological, literary, and socio-historical analysis) the aim of the research team is thus to enrich and complement ongoing international discussions about literature and travel in Japan with the unique contribution of Italian scholars.
