American Orient : imagining the East from the colonial era through the twentieth century

著者

書誌事項

American Orient : imagining the East from the colonial era through the twentieth century

David Weir

University of Massachusetts Press, c2011

  • : library cloth
  • : pbk

大学図書館所蔵 件 / 全11件

この図書・雑誌をさがす

注記

Includes bibliographical references and index

内容説明・目次

巻冊次

: library cloth ISBN 9781558498785

内容説明

How the image of the Orient has changed in American culture over the course of three centuries
巻冊次

: pbk ISBN 9781558498792

内容説明

Surveying the American fascination with the Far East since the mid-eighteenth century, this book explains why the Orient had a fundamentally different meaning in the United States than in Europe or Great Britain. David Weir argues that unlike their European counterparts, Americans did not treat the East simply as a site of imperialist adventure; on the contrary, colonial subjugation was an experience that early Americans shared with the peoples of China and India. In eighteenth-century America, the East was, paradoxically, a means of reinforcing the enlightenment values of the West: Franklin, Jefferson, and other American writers found in Confucius a complement to their own political and philosophical beliefs. In the nineteenth century, with the shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy, the Hindu Orient emerged as a mystical alternative to American reality. During this period, Emerson, Thoreau, and other Transcendentalists viewed the "Oriental" not as an exotic other but as an image of what Americans could be, if stripped of all the commercialism and materialism that set them apart from their ideal. A similar sense of Oriental otherness informed the aesthetic discoveries of the early twentieth century, as Pound, Eliot, and other poets found in Chinese and Japanese literature an artistic purity and intensity absent from Western tradition. For all of these figures the Orient became a complex fantasy that allowed them to overcome something objectionable, either in themselves or in the culture of which they were a part, in order to attain some freer, more genuine form of philosophical, religious, or artistic expression.

「Nielsen BookData」 より

詳細情報

ページトップへ