Neither Plagiarism nor Patchwork: The Culture of Citation and the Making of Authorship in Medieval Japanese Poetry

This article examines the connections between author, oeuvre, and institutions as reflected in the discourse of intellectual ownership from the late twelfth to the early sixteenth century. I address the issue by reconstructing the genealogies of authorship and “copyright” in literary treatises and by investigating a controversial poem in Ungyoku waka shō, a hitherto overlooked poetry collection dating from 1514. By unveiling how premodern authors represented themselves and their peers by means of literary reappropriation, I illustrate the intertextual and intersubjective trajectories that embodied these politics of authorship.