A Comparative Reading of Ihara Saikaku’s The Life of an Amorous Woman and Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders

The monograph focuses on The Life of an Amorous Woman (Koshoku Ichidai Onna) by lhara Saikaku (1642-1693), a popular writer of fiction rooted in the merchants' culture of seventeenth-century Japan, and Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), an early representative of English modern novel. Although there is a distance of time and space between the two works: Koshoku Ichidai Onna was published in 1686 and Moll Flanders in 1722, the comparative approach resulted in discovering a number of narrative similarities. The author succeeded in focusing on the universal mechanisms of both literary narration and communication between the writer and the reader. The comparative reading of European and Japanese literature shows itself as most inspiring and promising not only in the field of linguistic and literary confrontation but also in the area of literary theory, including the problems of typology and narrative uni-versals in prose traditions from different cultural backgrounds. prof. Romuald Huszcza