{"product_id":"american-orient-david-weir-9781558498792","title":"American Orient: Imagining the East from the Colonial Era Through the Twentieth Century","description":"\u003cp\u003eSurveying 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. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e David Weir\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 1558498796\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9781558498792\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e University of Massachusetts Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 07\/15\/2011\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 304\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 1.00lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 9.10h x 6.10w x 0.80d\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eReview Citation(s): \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eChoice\u003c\/i\u003e 02\/01\/2012\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eReference and Research Bk News\u003c\/i\u003e 10\/01\/2011 pg. 37","brand":"David Weir","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":48088559288575,"sku":"9781558498792","price":34.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_d49f2e24-e785-48da-8252-69a099caa98e.jpg?v=1769105442","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/american-orient-david-weir-9781558498792","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}