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.

this book investigates the spaces of interaction between portuguese and brazilian modernists--specifically oswald de andrade, augusto de campos and haroldo de campos, ronald de carvalho, ant nio ferro, fernando pessoa, m rio de s -carneiro--and their interpretation of nation. most importantly, the way in which their work echoes and transfigures the ulysses myth, to be termed portuguese ulyssism by brazilian gilberto freyre in his reading of lu's vaz de cam es's epic poem the lusiads, is analyzed, underlining the presence of a postcolonial ulysses in the lusophone world. the trope of the shipwreck is central to the creative production of these atlantic modernists who, outside of their respective national literatures, interact beyond the territories of nation-states through texts on exile, national identity, and colonialism.

in addition to the renowned the lusiads, the texts studied include two issues of the luso-brazilian quarterly orpheu (1915) and ant nio ferro's contributions to brazil's klaxon (1922, in celebration of the centenary of brazil's political independence from portugal); oswald de andrade's anthropophagic manifesto (1928) and an unpublished letter to ferro; fernando pessoa's poem "ulysses" in message (1934); and haroldo de campos's galaxies (1984) and "finismundo: the last voyage" (1997). in a postcolonial ulysses in the lusophone world, relocations and transfigurations of the ulysses myth inform a dialogue between the modernists of portugal and brazil through texts on exile, national identity, and colonialism.