An Ape of Gods – Beongcheon Yu (1964) (1st ed)

S$48.00

An Ape of Gods – Beongcheon Yu (1964) (1st ed)

S$48.00

Title: An Ape of Gods: The Art and Thought of Lafcadio Hearn

Author: Beongcheon Yu

Publisher: Wayne State University, 1964. First edition.

Condition: Hardcover, with dust jacket. Slight dust soiling to cover. Else fine.

SKU: ape-gods-hearn Categories: , , Tag:

From jacket flap:

Lafcadio Hearn has seemed a marginal figure in literary history because the general orientation of Hearn scholarship has been biographical, concentrating on his life and personality rather than on his art and thought. Critics have tended to read into Hearn’s writing his life experiences and translate his words into his life pattern. An Ape of Gods contends that if Hearn’s outer life is a romantic voyage, his inner life is incomparably more romantic and stirring, and that his works comprise the remarkable record of a mental traveler.

Beong-cheon Yu considers Hearn’s total achievement in the framework of art, criticism, and philosophy, focusing on specific areas which he believes important for a re-evaluation of Hearn’s art and thought: first, his translations, stylistic experiments, romances, twice-told legends, and travel books; second, his contribution to American literary criticism during the 1880’s, Japanese lectures, aesthetics of organic memory, and proposal for a world literature of humanity; third, his opinion of Japan, critique of the Western cults of individualism and passionalism, reconciliation of science and faith in terms of evolutionism and Buddhism, and final plea for integration of East and West on the basis of man as a whole being.