Meanings of Antiquity: Myth interpretation in Premodern Japan

In this talk, Matthieu Felt discusses his 2023 book Meanings of Antiquity, the first dedicated study of how the oldest Japanese myths, recorded in the eighth-century texts Kojiki and Nihon shoki, changed in meaning and significance between 800 and 1800 CE. Generations of Japanese scholars and students have turned to these two texts and their creation myths to understand what it means to be Japanese and where Japan fits into the world order. As the shape and scope of the world explained by these myths changed, the myths themselves evolved in turn, and Japan transformed from the center of a proud empire to a millet seed at the edge of the Buddhist world, from the last vestige of epics, political treatises, and textual commentary, Felt identifies the geographical, cosmological, epistemological, and semiotic changes that led to new adaptations of Japanese myths. Felt further demonstrates the links between new exegetical interpretations and their forebears, observations that require an extended approach to literary history.