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  1. Home
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  3. Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem
  • Cited by 38
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
December 2009
Print publication year:
1996
Online ISBN:
9780511570469
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511570469
Series:
Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (97)
Subjects:
Literature, Area Studies, American Literature, American Studies, Literary Theory, Asian Studies
Information

Book description

This is a critical and historical interpretation of 'Oriental' influences on American modernist poetry. Kern equates Fenollosa and Pound's 'discovery' of Chinese writing with the American pursuit of a natural language for poetry, what Emerson had termed the 'language of nature'. This language of nature is here shown to be a mythic conception continuous with the Renaissance idea of the language of Adam - a language lacking any difference between what it is and what it means. Through analysing and contextualising the nineteenth-century works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Ernest Fenollosa and the twentieth-century creations of Ezra Pound and Gary Snyder, Kern sheds light on the three contemporary nexuses of his search: the cultural study of Orientalism and the West, the evolution of Indo-European linguistic theory, and the intellectual tradition of American modernist poetry.

Reviews

"...kern does provide an excellent discussion of Western perceptions of poetry and languages over the past three centuries...Kern has certainly provided an excellent basis for further study." Colin A. Clarke, American Studies International

"...a valuable contribution to modernist scholarship." Paideuma

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