The neo-buddhist writings of Lafcadio Hearn : : light from the East / / Antony Goedhals.

• Superior document: East and West ; 7
• VerfasserIn: Goedhals, Antony,
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden ;, Boston : : Brill,, [2020]; ©2020
• Year of Publication: 2020
• Language: English
• Series: East and West ; 7.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource.

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.

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 170 -- ‘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.