Lafcadio Hearn and Global Aestheticism

Abstract

Lafcadio Hearn’s writings provide a radically different understanding of literary cosmopolitanism from Wilde’s. This chapter studies Hearn’s attempts to translate and transpose aestheticism onto a global stage. It argues that Hearn’s works compound a commitment to preserving cultural differences with essentialism, exoticism, and even, paradoxically, elements of cultural nationalism. Hearn’s early translations of Théophile Gautier’s fantastic stories created a dialogue between metropolitan European aestheticism and the cosmopolitan culture of nineteenth-century New Orleans. In his writings on Japan, Hearn employed literary impressionism and ghost narratives (some of which look back to Gautier) to interrogate his own authority as Western essayist and to capture the peculiar temporality of turn-of-the-century Japan, a country caught between traditional culture and modernization, nationalist and cosmopolitan tendencies. In Japan, Hearn also lectured extensively on British aestheticism, encouraging his students to draw inspiration from it for the creation of a cosmopolitan Japanese literature of the future.