American Orient: Imagining the East from the Colonial Era Through the Twentieth Century by Weir, David

American Orient: Imagining the East from the Colonial Era Through the Twentieth Century (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781558498792)

Vendor: David Weir
Product type: Books
Format: Paperback
$34.95
$34.95
$34.95
Subtotal: $34.95
American Orient: Imagining the East from the Colonial Era Through the Twentieth Century by Weir, David

American Orient: Imagining the East from the Colonial Era Through the Twentieth Century

$34.95
American Orient: Imagining the East from the Colonial Era Through the Twentieth Century by Weir, David

American Orient: Imagining the East from the Colonial Era Through the Twentieth Century

$34.95
Format: Paperback
Description
Description
x

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.

Author: David Weir
ISBN-10: 1558498796
ISBN-13: 9781558498792
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Language: English
Published: 07/15/2011
Pages: 304
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 0.80d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 02/01/2012
Reference and Research Bk News 10/01/2011 pg. 37
By David Weir
By David Weir
x

DAVID WEIR is professor of comparative literature at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. He is author of Decadence and the Making of Modernism and Anarchy and Culture: The Aesthetic Politics of Modernism, both published by the University of Massachusetts Press.

Recently Viewed Products