The Neo-Buddhist Writings of Lafcadio Hearn: Light from the East (East and West, 7)

Book info: The Neo-Buddhist Writings of Lafcadio Hearn: Light from the East (East and West, 7) (Hardcover, 266 pages) – Brill, 2020. Language: English.

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. Editorial Reviews About the Author Antony Goedhals, Ph.D. (2018), University of Pretoria, is a Lecturer in English literature at that university. He is a generalist and teaches texts from the medieval through the modern periods. He has published on Chaucer and on Hearn.