Autorentext

Edoardo Gerlini is Associate Professor of classical Japanese language and literature at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy. His recent publications include: Textual Heritage Embodied: Entanglements of Tangible and Intangible in the Aoi no ue utaibon of the Hsh School of Noh (Studies in Japanese Literature and Culture, 2022) and Textual Heritage and Digital Archives The Case of the Hyakugo Archive in Kyoto (Open Research Europe, 2023). He is also co-editor of the volume, Koten wa isan ka? (Bensei, 2021).

Andrea Giolai is Assistant Professor of Ethnography and Performing Arts of Japan at Leiden University. His ethnographic research focuses on Japanese courtly and ceremonial music (Gagaku), the reconstruction of ancient musical materials, and the relation between sound, loss, and environmental change. His research has been published in journals like Asian Anthropology (2019) and the Journal of Religion in Japan (2020), and in edited collections, including the Bloomsbury Handbook of Japanese Religions (2021), Gagaku. The Cultural Impact of Japanese Ceremonial Music (De Gruyter 2025), and The Oxford Handbook of Ecomusicology (forthcoming).

Klappentext

The relationship between texts and the field of cultural heritage remains ill-defined. Although scholarship has long recognized the importance of textual practices in mediating cultural identity and memory, the emphasis heritage studies places on authentic, material traces downplays the unique impact of their creative transmission and appropriation. Focusing on the afterlives of written artifacts and the re-use of their textual contents, primarily within East Asia, Textual Heritage highlights how textual practices offer a lens for understanding questions of canonization, embodiment, and circulation. Through case studies ranging from Japanese court music to Japanese linked verse, this volume advances a theory of "humanistic heritage studies" that better understands the overlap between literary and heritage studies.