Author: S. Frederick Starr
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Published: 2009-09-28
Total Pages: 268
ISBN-13: 1628469196
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) prowled the streets of New Orleans from 1877 to 1888 before moving on to a new life and global fame as a chronicler of Japan. Hearn's influence on our perceptions of New Orleans, however, has unjustly remained unknown. In ten years of serving as a correspondent and selling his writing in such periodicals as the New Orleans Daily Item, Times-Democrat, Harper's Weekly, and Scribner's Magazine he crystallized the way Americans view New Orleans and its south Louisiana environs. Hearn was prolific, producing colorful and vivid sketches, vignettes, news articles, essays, translations of French and Spanish literature, book reviews, short stories, and woodblock prints. He haunted the French Quarter to cover such events as the death of Marie Laveau. His descriptions of the seamy side of New Orleans, tainted with voodoo, debauchery, and mystery made a lasting impression on the nation. Denizens of the Crescent City and devotees who flock there for escapades and pleasures will recognize these original tales of corruption, of decay and benign frivolity, and of endless partying. With his writing, Hearn virtually invented the national image of New Orleans as a kind of alternative reality to the United States as a whole. S. Frederick Starr, a leading authority on New Orleans and Louisiana culture, edits the volume, adding an introduction that places Hearn in a social, historical, and literary context. Hearn was sensitive to the unique cultural milieu of New Orleans and Louisiana. During the decade that he spent in New Orleans, Hearn collected songs for the well-known New York music critic Henry Edward Krehbiel and extensively studied Creole French, making valuable and lasting contributions to ethnomusicology and linguistics. Hearn's writings on Japan are famous and have long been available. But Inventing New Orleans: Writings of Lafcadio Hearn brings together a selection of Hearn's nonfiction on New Orleans and Louisiana, creating a previously unavailable sampling. In these pieces Hearn, an Anglo-Greek immigrant who came to America by way of Ireland, is alternately playful, lyrical, and morbid. This gathering also features ten newly discovered sketches. Using his broad stylistic palette, Hearn conjures up a lost New Orleans which later writers such as William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams used to evoke the city as both reality and symbol.
Author: Lafcadio Hearn
Publisher:
Published: 1918
Total Pages: 166
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A collection of 20 fairy tales from Japan including "Chin-Chin Kobakama," "The Serpent with Eight Heads," and "The Tea-Kettle."
Author: Sukehiro Hirakawa
Publisher: Global Oriental
Published: 2007-03-29
Total Pages: 294
ISBN-13: 9004213473
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This volume presents twenty-two diverse essays drawn from papers delivered at conferences held in four cities in Japan in 2004 – the centenary of Lafcadio Hearn's death –, as well as at other international conferences that took place earlier. Contributors are Joan Blythe, John Clubbe, Susan Fisher, Ted Goosen, George Hughes, Yoko Makino, Peter McIvor, Hitobe Nabae, Cody Poulton and Masaru Toda.
Author: Simon J. Bronner
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2014-10-17
Total Pages: 256
ISBN-13: 0813156351
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The American essays of renowned writer Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) artistically chronicle the robust urban life of Cincinnati and New Orleans. Hearn is one of the few chroniclers of urban American life in the nineteenth century, and much of this material has not been widely available since the 1950s. Lafcadio Hearn's America collects Hearn's stories of vagabonds, river people, mystics, criminals, and some of the earliest accounts available of black and ethnic urban folklife in America. He was a frequently consulted expert on America during his years in Japan, and these editorials reflect on the problems and possibilities of American life as the country entered its greatest century. Hearn's work, which reflects an America that is less "melting pot" than a varied, spicy, and often exotic gumbo, provide essential background for the study of America's first steps away from its agrarian beginnings.
Author: Yone Noguchi
Publisher: Read Books Ltd
Published: 2013-05-31
Total Pages: 114
ISBN-13: 1473387426
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"This book, "Lafcadio Hearn in Japan," is our Japanese appreciation; we observed him under many different shades, but our appreciation of his art, and also of him as a man-unique in character doubtless, sincere even to a fault,-and as a professor in our Imperial University, is uniform, I think, through every chapter. Where you will find a frequent repetition in the book is the exact place we wish to emphasize; and if the book appears to lack a certain unity, I will say that it was not my intention to write a biography." Yone Noguchi