The strange fate of monogatari after the Genji: the genealogy of the term 'giko,' from style to subgenre

要旨

Twentieth-century literary criticism of the monogatari genre makes fairly frequent use of the subgenre term "giko monogatari" to refer to lateand post-Heian era monogatari, 1 and especially those of the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries.The term itself appears to have emerged only very early in this century, and definitions that accompany its usage in literary histories are somewhat confusing and contradictory, varying in terms of the period to which it applies, whether it constitutes a writing style or a genre, and in terms of whether it is favourably or unfavourably evaluated.Accordingly, it is worth examining the characteristics attributed to the subgenre to see if it can be defined in a principled way and to see if such a definition corresponds to any subgeneric awareness perceptible in works from the period it refers to, especially in the early thirteenth-century Mumyo-zoshi ~~1ti-f'.-, 2 an exceptionally interesting monogatari reception history text consisting of the discussion group of women regarding the monogatari they have read.As part of this process of defining the connotations of giko monogatari, it will be instructive to try to trace the genealogy of the

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