About

Brian Steininger is an Associate Professor of Japanese Literature in the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. His research focuses on the reception of Chinese textual culture in premodern Japan, examining literary form, social practice, and media history. His first book, Chinese Literary Forms in Heian Japan: Poetics and Practice, explores the social life of Sinitic verse and parallel prose in tenth and eleventh-century Japan, demonstrating how classical genres were reshaped through exchange and ritual performance. He has an ongoing interest in interlingual applications of Literary Sinitic across premodern East Asia and co-organizes the Colloquium on Literacies across East Asia, held alternately at Princeton and Columbia University. Currently, he is researching the media of scholarship in thirteenth and fourteenth-century Japan, focusing on the intermingling of manuscript and print modes of reproduction and exegesis. Steininger has taught courses on Japanese literature, East Asian humanities, book history, and comic books at Princeton. His academic background includes a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages & Literatures from Yale University and a B.A. in English and Asian Studies from Macalester College. He has also undertaken coursework at Sophia University, National Taiwan University, and the University of Tokyo, and held visiting appointments at Keio University, Waseda University, and the Institute for Advanced Study.

Research topics

• Art
• Literature
• History
• Computer Science
• Classics
• Ancient history
• Philosophy
• Linguistics
• Astronomy
• Archaeology
• Law
• Physics

Selected publications

• Preface

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2023

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  DOI

• Reflecting the Past: Place, Language, and Principle in Japan's Medieval Mirror Genre by Erin L. Brightwell

  Journal of Japanese Studies · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Literature
  • History
  • Ancient history

  Reviewed by: Reflecting the Past: Place, Language, and Principle in Japan's Medieval Mirror Genre by Erin L. Brightwell Brian Steininger (bio) Reflecting the Past: Place, Language, and Principle in Japan's Medieval Mirror Genre. By Erin L. Brightwell. Harvard University Asia Center, 2020. xiv, 322 pages. $60.00. An anonymous traveler to the temple Unrin'in north of Heian-kyō encounters a trio of uncanny elders. One of them, called Yotsugi, claims to be 190 years old and offers a narrative determined to explain the multigenerational twists of fate that resulted in the glorious hegemony of Fujiwara no Michinaga (966–1028), beginning from events in the mid-ninth century and extending to a present moment just before Michinaga's death. This is a "tale" (monogatari) of Yotsugi—that is both Yotsugi the narrator and yo-tsugi (lineage)—and was labeled as such, but by the twelfth century another name for the work began to circulate in parallel: Ōkagami (The great mirror). In the ensuing years, a string of successors followed: the preface to Masukagami (circa 1368–75) mentions Imakagami (1174–75), covering circa 1025–1170, and Mizukagami (late twelfth century), covering from the legendary Emperor Jinmu through 850 (as well as a now-lost work, Iyayotsugi, which may have focused on the late twelfth century). At the same time, other Mirrors were appearing as well. Kara kagami (mid-thirteenth century) provides a grammar-school overview of major historical figures across Chinese history, while Azuma kagami (circa 1290s) is an official record of the Kamakura shogunate. Reflecting the Past takes as its project the tracing of "the Mirror genre." Its most important intervention lies in proposing the latter as a historically meaningful category: many of the works Erin Brightwell examines have rarely or never been discussed together before and in mainstream scholarship are divided into quite different genres (vernacular history, official chronicle, anecdote collection, and even poetic treatise). Brightwell slips between several types of generic definition over the course of the study, and this diffuseness ultimately limits the force of her case for understanding Mirrors (kagamimono) as a genre. However, the originality of the approach produces a host of startling juxtapositions and trenchant questions that will stimulate and challenge any scholar of the medieval period. After an introduction that contextualizes the Mirrors within a larger opposition between tales and chronicles, chapter 1 presents a double origin for the genre: an ambivalent progenitor in Ōkagami, whose employment of [End Page 187] the tale form and insistence on karmic principles are retrospectively read and systematized in its sequel, Imakagami. The remaining chapters focus on post-Heian innovations and reactions. Chapter 2 turns to Mizukagami; for Brightwell, both this work and the preceding Imakagami are defined by the violent context of the great wars of the twelfth century. Where Ima kagami attempts to validate a "recuperative" historical order (p. 51), the later Mizukagami resorts to the normalization of cyclical violence (p. 111). Chapter 3 focuses on Kara kagami, the culmination of a wave of works in the late twelfth through mid-thirteenth centuries that sought to vernacularize (if not popularize) the historical and literary lore of Chinese tradition (including Kara monogatari, Minamoto no Mitsuyuki's waka sequences, and Sugawara no Tamenaga's translation of Zhenguan zhengyao). This work is undoubtedly the most understudied of the Mirrors Brightwell examines, and the chapter will be correspondingly eye-opening for anyone interested in the intellectual world of the thirteenth century. The focus of chapter 4, Azuma kagami, has by contrast been studied intensively by historians of the Kamakura shogunate though largely ignored by literature scholars. Here Brightwell offers an intriguing reading of this work as a mode of historiography of the "institution" necessitated by the abandonment of court-centered traditions of authority (as well as a detour into Nomori no kagami, a contemporary treatise on waka poetics). The final chapter takes up Masukagami, the last of the traditional "Four Mirrors" (Ōkagami, Imakagami, Mizukagami, Masukagami), alongside the less well-known Shinmeikyō, another fourteenth-century work that narrates the imperial bloodline from Jinmu down to the present. Brightwell sees these works as essentially trapped in a genre that had become moribund as its claims to reliability lost purchase...

  PublisherDOI

• No Moonlight in My Cup: Sinitic Poetry (Kanshi) from the Japanese Court, Eighth to the Twelfth Centuries. Edited and translated by Judith N. Rabinovitch and Timothy R. BradstocK

  Journal of the American Oriental Society · 2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Art
  • Literature

  
 
 
 No Moonlight in My Cup: Sinitic Poetry (Kanshi) from the Japanese Court, Eighth to the Twelfth Centuries. Edited and translated by Judith N. Rabinovitch and Timothy R. BradstocK. East Asian Comparative Literature and Culture, vol. 10. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Pp. xxvi + 474. $232.
 
 

  PublisherDOI

• Prayers for Meditation: Thirteenth-Century Textual Culture between Kōya and Kamakura

  Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Literature
  • Art

  This paper examines several esoteric doctrinal texts printed on Mt.Kōya in the late 1270s by the shogunate official Adachi Yasumori (1231-1285).Conventional histories of Japanese xylography follow a developmental sequence from devotional printing by wealthy aristocrats in the classical (Heian) period, through limited educational printing by temples in the medieval period, to the arrival of widespread commercial printing in the early modern period.This paper examines the complex interplay of soteriological, practical, political, and commercial elements in one medieval printing project to both critique an 'ends'-based typology of textual reproduction and further develop recent arguments on the role of esoteric Buddhism in coordinating medieval power centers.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Scribal Imaginary in Medieval Japanese Paratexts

  Journal of Japanese Studies · 2019-01-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The Tang erotic novella You xianku (Jpn. Yūsenkutsu) was quickly forgotten in China but enjoyed unusual success in Japan, motivated by a unique vernacular reading tradition and appropriation by Shingon Buddhism. Manuscripts of the tale scattered in Japanese monastic libraries provide evidence of a complex sphere of rhetorical play and classical scholarship neglected by modern literary history. The larger conditions of textual circulation were transformed by the political tumult of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the You xianku manuscripts contain colophons and other paratexts that function as conflicting representational responses to this era of change.

  PublisherDOI

• Nihon koten shoshigakuron 日本古典書誌学論, written by Sasaki Takahiro 佐々木孝浩

  East Asian Publishing and Society · 2018-04-05

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Manuscript Culture and Chinese Learning in Medieval Kamakura

  Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies · 2018-01-01 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  As medieval shogunate officials sought to project their influence outward over the land as well as in competition with one another, classical Chinese scholarship served as an important means of demonstrating cultural attainment and justifying authority. Despite the political and economic power of these figures, neither the texts themselves nor instruction in them were necessarily immediately accessible. I examine the reception of Chinese literary and philosophical texts in thirteenth-century Kamakura, reconstructing the modes of reproduction specific to such works within the larger medieval textual sphere. Analyzing paratextual features of one 1280 manuscript of the anthology <i>Wenxuan</i> indicates the institutional forces that slowed the efforts of eastern elites to replicate the cultural capacities of Kyoto. Such extant manuscripts provide the necessary evidence for a holistic analysis of medieval Japanese textual culture, revealing its network of circulation in the midst of historic changes. 摘要: 帝王学としての古典籍は権力者にとって欠かせない道具であった。本論文は鎌倉中期における中国古典の複写・流通様式を分析し、関東武家が本の入手に如何に苦心したかを明らかにすると共に、鎌倉期写本を通し、京と新文化拠点との関係を書物の側面から考究する。

  PublisherDOI

• Chinese Literary Forms in Heian Japan: Poetics and Practice

  2017-06-26 · 12 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  "Examines the transformation of Chinese literary genres in mid-Heian Japan by focusing on the ritualized recitation practices through which these works were performed and heard. This reconstruction of recitation as both a social and literary act demonstrates Sinographic literature's practical use among the capital nobility and modifications of Tang aesthetic principles"--

• Couplet Collections and Aesthetic Strategy

  Harvard University Asia Center eBooks · 2017-10-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Chinese Literary Form in Heian Japan

  Harvard University Asia Center eBooks · 2017-01-01 · 3 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Haruo Shirane

  5 shared

• David B. Lurie

  University of California, Los Angeles

  4 shared

• Wiebke Denecke

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  2 shared

• Torquil Duthie

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2 shared

• Joshua S. Mostow

  2 shared

• Brian Vivier

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1 shared

• J. Kim

  1 shared

• Jamie Yoo

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1 shared