Overview

The Neo-Buddhist Writings of Lafcadio Hearn: Light from the East by Antony Goedhals offers radical rereadings of a misunderstood and undervalued Victorian writer. It reveals that at the metaphysical core of Lafcadio Hearn’s writings is a Buddhist vision as yet unappreciated by his critics and biographers. Beginning with the American writings and ending with the essay- and story-meditations of the Japanese period, the book demonstrates Hearn’s deeply personal and transcendently beautiful evocations of a Buddhist universe, and shows how these deconstruct and dissolve the categories of Western discourse and thinking about reality – to create a new language, a poetry of vastness, emptiness, and oneness that had not been heard before in English, or, indeed, in the West.

Full Product Details

Author:   Antony Goedhals
Publisher:   Brill
Imprint:   Brill
Volume:   7
Weight:   0.522kg
ISBN:  

9789004430327

ISBN 10:   9004430326
Pages:   248
Publication Date:   01 May 2020
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Available To Order  
We have confirmation that this item is in stock with the supplier. It will be ordered in for you and dispatched immediately.

Table of Contents

 Preface  Acknowledgements  List of Illustrations  Notes on the Text and Conventions Adopted 1 A Metaphysics of Buddhism and Its History in the West  Introduction  Core Issues Outlined: the Letters of George Milbry Gould and Basil Hall Chamberlain  Dr George Milbry Gould  Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain  Hearn’s Reception in the West  The Existing Scholarship on Hearn’s Buddhism  The Advent of Buddhism to the West  The European Discovery of Buddhism in ‘British’ India  Buddhism a Radical Metaphysic  Buddhism a Construct, a Story  Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia (1879)  Conclusion 2 Biographical and Critical Studies of Hearn  Introduction  The ad hominem Nature of Biographical and Critical – ‘Bio-critical’ – Works on Hearn  The Bio-critical Memes of Hearn Studies  Biographies and Bio-critical Works on Hearn   Elizabeth Bisland’s Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn (1906)   George Milbry Gould’s Concerning Lafcadio Hearn (1908)   Hearn’s Work Denigrated by Attacking the Man   Hearn’s Ancestry and Vision Attacked   Hearn’s going ‘Fantee’ and his Abandonment of a Loving Father-God   George M. Gould Collection of Hearniana: a Testimony to Obsession and Fearfulness   The History of Gould’s Encounter with Hearn and Gould’s Deprecation of Hearn on Grounds of Defective Vision   Hearn is ‘the Poet of Myopia’   Gould’s Fatherly Theism   God as ‘Biologos’ Creating out of Dead Matter the Garden of the World   ‘Karma’: a Tale Told for its Teller  Post-Gould, pre-World War I Critical Biographies of Hearn   Joseph De Smet’s Lafcadio Hearn: l’Homme et l’œuvre (1911) and Edward Thomas’s Lafcadio Hearn (1912)   Nina Kennard’s Lafcadio Hearn (1912)   Yone Noguchi’s Lafcadio Hearn in Japan (1910)   Setsuko Koizumi’s Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn (1918), Kazuo Koizumi’s Father and I: Memories of Lafcadio Hearn (1935), and Re-Echo (1957)  Critical Biographies of Hearn Written between the Two World Wars   Edward Larocque Tinker’s Lafcadio Hearn’s American Days (1924)   Jean Temple’s Blue Ghost: A Study of Lafcadio Hearn (1931) and Oscar Lewis’s Hearn and His Biographers: The Record of a Literary Controversy (1930)   Hearn – An Interpreter of Buddhism   Kenneth Kirkwood’s Unfamiliar Lafcadio Hearn (1936)  Critical Biographies of Hearn Written after World War II   Vera McWilliams’s Lafcadio Hearn (1946)   Orcutt William Frost’s Young Hearn (1958)   Elizabeth Stevenson’s The Grass Lark: A Study of Lafcadio Hearn (1961)   The Dorothea McClelland Papers  Critical Biographies of Hearn in the 1960s and 1970s   Albert Mordell’s Discoveries: Essays on Lafcadio Hearn (1964)   Beongcheon Yu’s An Ape of Gods: The Art and Thought of Lafcadio Hearn (1964), Arthur Kunst’s Lafcadio Hearn (1969), and Kenneth Rexroth’s The Buddhist Writings of Lafcadio Hearn (1977)  Contemporary Biographies of Hearn   Paul Murray’s Fantastic Journey: The Life and Literature of Lafcadio Hearn (1993)   Jonathan Cott’s Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn (1991)   Robert Rosenstone’s Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters with Meiji Japan (1988)  Conclusion 3 Buddhism in the American Writings and ‘Seeking the Orient at Home’  Introduction  Hearn’s First Encounters with Buddhism   Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia   Atheism and Individual Responsibility in The Light of Asia   Causation, Karma, Reincarnation, and the Interrelation of all Phenomena in The Light of Asia   Buddhism a Revisioning of ‘the Self’   Buddhism a Revisioning of the Problem of Death   Hearn’s Buddhism Ontological, not Moralistic  Articles about Buddhism   The Times-Democrat a ‘Buddhist Newspaper’, an ‘Infidel sheet’   ‘The People We Send Missionaries To’   ‘The World’s Worships’   ‘What Buddhism Is’   ‘Recent Buddhist Literature’  Articles about the Hindu-Buddhist Matrix and Other ‘Oriental’ Subjects   ‘Edwin Arnold’s New Book’   The ‘Neo-Buddhism of the Theosophists’  Herbert Spencer’s ‘Synthetic Philosophy’ and Buddhism  Hearn’s Translations of Buddhist Stories and His Neo-Buddhist Fictions   Stray Leaves From Strange Literature   ‘The Legend of the Monster Misfortune’   ‘A Parable Buddhistic’   ‘Pundari’   ‘Yamaraja’   ‘The Lotus of Faith’  Hearn’s ‘fantastics’ and Ghost Stories: Meditations on Love and Death   Background to the ‘fantastics’   ‘When I was a Flower’   ‘A Dead Love’   ‘His Heart is Old’   ‘Hereditary Memories’   ‘Metempsychosis’   ‘The Undying One’   ‘The Story of Ming-Y’  Hearn’s Cosmic ‘fantastics’   ‘Subhadra’   ‘The Life of Stars’ and ‘The Destiny of Solar Systems’   ‘The great “I-Am”’ and ‘A Concord Compromise’  Conclusion 4 Japan and the ‘Romance of Reality’  Introduction  ‘Popular’ or ‘Lower’ Buddhism   ‘From the Diary of an English Teacher’   ‘The Writings of Kōbōdaishi’ and ‘Jizō’   ‘A Pilgrimage to Enoshima’   ‘At the Market of the Dead’, ‘By the Japanese Sea’, and ‘From Hōki to Oki’  Shinto   ‘Bon-Odori’ and ‘The Household Shrine’  Individual Observations of Reality: Hearn’s Buddhist Meditations   ‘My First Day in the Orient’  The ‘Shock of Emptiness’   ‘From a Traveling Diary’   ‘In the Twilight of the Gods’  Three Central Essay-Meditations   The ancestors, karma   ‘The Idea of Preëxistence’   ‘Some Thoughts About Ancestor-Worship’   ‘Nirvana: A Study in Synthetic Buddhism’  Three Central Story-Meditations   ‘Dust’   ‘The Stone Buddha’   ‘In Yokohama’: closing the cycle of the ‘Buddhist papers’  The Buddhist Writings of the Last Years  ‘Insect-Studies’   ‘Story of a Fly’, ‘Fireflies’, ‘Gaki’, ‘Kusa-Hibari’, and ‘Mosquitoes’  Stories with Buddhist Settings   ‘Within the Circle’   ‘The Story of a Tengu’   ‘A Legend of Fugen-Bosatsu’   ‘Fragment’ and the Fenollosas   Ernest Fenollosa’s Attack on Hearn in The Atlantic Monthly  Oneness   ‘A Drop of Dew’   ‘Of Moon-Desire’  The Paradise of Possible Worlds  Time-Travel and Ghost Stories   ‘The Reconciliation’   ‘The Story of Itō Norisuké’  Conclusion 5 Conclusion  Bibliography   Hearn’s Writings   Secondary Texts  Index

Reviews

Author Information

Antony Goedhals, Ph.D. (2018), University of Pretoria, is a Lecturer in English literature at that university. He is a generalist and teaches texts from the medieval through the modern periods. He has published on Chaucer and on Hearn.

Tab Content 6

Author Website:  

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

No review item found!

Add your own review!

Countries Available

All regions