STUDYING THE LITERARY GENRE OF UTA-MONOGATARI IN MODERN JAPANESE SCIENCE

Abstract

The article deals with the history of the study of the genre of uta-monogotari (歌物語), which played an important role in the process of formation of Japanese national prose.

The interest in this issue is determined by the need to understand the complex literary processes that took place in Japan during the medieval period. Analyzing the complex and ambiguous literary processes that accompanied the development of medieval literature in Japan has important theoretical significance. The study of complex intra-literary processes will contribute to the expansion of ideas about the literary processes of the cultural heritage of East Asian peoples both at the cultural-regional level and at the historical scale. The significance of this study is explained by the fact that the literature of Japan at a certain stage of intensive development and for a relatively short historical period passed the way from semi-folklore poetic anthologies to the creation of the novel-epic.

In this connection, determining the role of the genre of uta-monogatari (歌物語) in the history of Japanese literature helps not only to more fully reconstruct an objective picture of the development of Japanese literature, but also to trace and analyze all aspects of the further development of medieval Japanese literature. The Heian era in general differed from all previous and subsequent historical periods by a peculiar form of world outlook, which served as a ground for the development of the genre of uta-monogatari.

The author of the article makes an attempt to trace the process of formation and development of the genre of uta-monogatari within the framework of the formation of national Japanese literature. Namely, the author talks about the main stages of formation and development of the genre of uta-monogatari in the context of historical and literary development of Japan IX-X centuries, touches upon the plot, compositional and stylistic features of the literary monument.