EAST 330 Floating World: Early Modern Japanese Literature

You often hear the differences between Primary and Secondary Sources defined for you.

Primary sources vary based on your field of study. For example, an early modern Japanese literary work such as Hiraga Gennai’s essay “On Farting” in An Edo Anthology: Literature from Japan’s Mega-City, 1750-1850 (2013) is a primary source. Sumie Jones’s introduction to the essay and Katsuya Hirano’s 2011 journal article “Politics and Poetics of the Body in Early Modern Japan” that discusses the essay are both secondary sources. Reference works such as 日本古典文学大辞典 and The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics are tertiary sources that compile and summarize information from primary and secondary sources. 

However, if the question you are trying to answer is how early modern Japanese literature is anthologized for an English audience, or how encyclopedic introductions of world poetry cover Japanese early modern poetics, Jones’s introduction and entries in The Princeton Encyclopedia will be your primary texts ー any source can be primary, secondary, or irrelevant to your project, depending on their relationship with your questions. 

For an engaging elaboration on primary sources and how to use them, see “Fifty Ways to Read a Cereal Box” (pgs.67-77) in Where Research Begins. See the OBIS link below.

From libguibe “Creating an Annotated Bibliography”