Title
East-West Literary Imagination: Cultural Exchanges from Yeats to Morrison
Files
Description
This study traces the shaping presence of cultural interactions, arguing that American literature has become a hybridization of Eastern and Western literary traditions. Cultural exchanges between the East and West began in the early decades of the nineteenth century as American transcendentalists explored Eastern philosophies and arts. Hakutani examines this influence through the works of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. He further demonstrates the East-West exchange through discussions of the interactions by modernists such as Yone Noguchi, Yeats, Pound, Camus, and Kerouac.
Finally, he argues that African American literature, represented by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and James Emanuel, is postmodern. Their works exhibit their concerted efforts to abolish marginality and extend referentiality, exemplifying the postmodern East-West crossroads of cultures. A fuller understanding of their work is gained by situating them within this cultural conversation. The writings of Wright, for example, take on their full significance only when they are read, not as part of a national literature, but as an index to an evolving literature of cultural exchanges.
ISBN
ISBN-10: 0826220800, ISBN-13: 9780826220806
Publication Date
2-2017
Publisher
University of Missouri Press
City
Columbia, MO
Disciplines
American Literature | Comparative Literature | Literature in English, North America
Department
English
Recommended Citation
Hakutani, Yoshinobu (2017). East-West Literary Imagination: Cultural Exchanges from Yeats to Morrison. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press. Retrieved from https://digitalcommons.kent.edu/facultybooks/110