Introduction: Ihara Saikaku and Eighteenth-Century Studies

Abstract: This introduction offers Ihara Saikaku's work as a prime example of the need to globalize eighteenth-century studies and briefly sketches some of the challenges of such a task, focusing particularly on how emerging frameworks of world literature engage existing literary categories, particularly realism. Though reading Saikaku's work as realist makes sense in many ways and facilitates his inclusion into existing paradigms of the field, it also risks flattening his work or only engaging aspects of it that would accord with those categories.