in the last half-century ludwig wittgenstein's relevance beyond analytic philosophy, to continental philosophy, to cultural studies, and to the arts has been widely acknowledged.

wittgenstein's tractatus logico-philosophicus was published in 1922 - the annus mirabilis of modernism - alongside joyce's ulysses, eliot's the waste land, mansfield's the garden party and woolf's jacob's room. bertolt brecht's first play to be produced, drums in the night, was first staged in 1922, as was jean cocteau's antigone, with settings by pablo picasso and music by arthur honegger. in different ways, all these modernist landmarks dealt with the crisis of representation and the demise of eternal metaphysical and ethical truths. wittgenstein's tractatus can be read as defining, expressing and reacting to this crisis. in his later philosophy, wittgenstein adopted a novel philosophical attitude, sensitive to the ordinary uses of language as well as to the unnoticed dogmas they may betray. if the gist of modernism is self-reflection and attention to the way form expresses content, then wittgenstein's later ideas - in their fragmented form as well as their "ear-opening" contents - deliver it most precisely.

understanding wittgenstein, understanding modernism shows wittgenstein's work, both early and late, to be closely linked to the modernist geist that prevailed during his lifetime. yet it would be wrong to argue that wittgenstein was a modernist tout court. for wittgenstein, as well as for modernist art, understanding is not gained by such straightforward statements. it needs time, hesitation, a variety of articulations, the refusal of tempting solutions, and perhaps even a sense of defeat. it is such a vision of the linkage between wittgenstein and modernism that guides the present volume.

telling stories: that sounds innocuous enough. but for the first chronicle in the japanese vernacular, a tale of flowering fortunes (eiga monogatari), there was more to worry about than a good yarn. the health of the community was at stake. flowering tales is the first extensive literary study of this historical tale, which covers about 150 years of births, deaths, and happenings in late heian society, a golden age of court literature in women's hands. takeshi watanabe contends that the blossoming of tales, marked by the tale of genji, inspired eiga's new affective history: an exorcism of embittered spirits whose stories needed to be retold to ensure peace.

tracing the narrative arcs of politically marginalized figures, watanabe shows how eiga's female authors adapted the discourse and strategies of the tale of genji to rechannel wayward ghosts into the community through genealogies that relied not on blood but on literary resonances. these reverberations, highlighted through comparisons to contemporaneous accounts in courtiers' journals, echo through shared details of funerary practices, political life, and characterization. flowering tales reanimates these eleventh-century voices to trouble conceptions of history: how it ought to be recounted, who got to record it, and why remembering mattered.