American Orient : imagining the East from the colonial era through the twentieth century

Surveying the American fascination with the Far East since the mid-eighteenth century, this book explains why the Orient had a fundamentally different meaning in the United States than in Europe or Great Britain. David Weir argues that unlike their European counterparts, Americans did not treat the East simply as a site of imperialist adventure; on the contrary, colonial subjugation was an experience that early Americans shared with the peoples of China and India. In eighteenth-century America, the East was, paradoxically, a means of reinforcing the enlightenment values of the West: Franklin, Jefferson, and other American writers found in Confucius a complement to their own political and philosophical beliefs. In the nineteenth century, with the shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy, the Hindu Orient emerged as a mystical alternative to American reality. During this period, Emerson, Thoreau, and other Transcendentalists viewed the "Oriental" not as an exotic other but as an image of what Americans could be, if stripped of all the commercialism and materialism that set them apart from their ideal. A similar sense of Oriental otherness informed the aesthetic discoveries of the early twentieth century, as Pound, Eliot, and other poets found in Chinese and Japanese literature an artistic purity and intensity absent from Western tradition. For all of these figures the Orient became a complex fantasy that allowed them to overcome something objectionable, either in themselves or in the culture of which they were a part, in order to attain some freer, more genuine form of philosophical, religious, or artistic expression. In this book, David Weir explains why the American fascination with the Far East is older than the United States itself. From the middle of the eighteenth century on, Americans had a fundamentally different attitude toward the Orient that set them apart from their British and European counterparts, who treated the East simply as a site of imperialist adventure.In eighteenth-century America, the East became a paradoxical means of reinforcing the enlightenment values of the West: Franklin, Jefferson, and other American writers found in Confucius a complement to their own political and philosophical beliefs. In the nineteenth century, with the shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy, Emerson, Thoreau, and other Transcendentalists saw the Hindu Orient as a mystical alternative to an increasingly commercial and materialist American reality. A similar sense of "Oriental" otherness informed the aesthetic discoveries of the early twentieth century, as Pound, Eliot, and other poets found in Chinese and Japanese literature an artistic purity and intensity absent from Western tradition. From the Beat Generation of the 1950s to the yoga vogue of more recent years, the same tendency continues: Americans transform the East into a complex fantasy that helps them overcome something objectionable, either in themselves or in their culture, in order to achieve a more authentic form of philosophical, religious, or artistic expression. "In eighteenth-century America, the East was, paradoxically, a means of reinforcing the enlightenment values of the West: Franklin, Jefferson, and other American writers found in Confucius a complement to their own political and philosophical beliefs. In the nineteenth century, with the shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy, the Hindu Orient emerged as a mystical alternative to American reality. During this period, Emerson, Thoreau, and other Transcendentalists viewed the "Oriental" not as an exotic other but as an image of what Americans could be, if stripped of all the commercialism and materialism that set them apart from their ideal. A similar sense of Oriental otherness informed the aesthetic discoveries of the early twentieth century, as Pound, Eliot, and other poets found in Chinese and Japanese literature an artistic purity and intensity absent from Western tradition. For all of these figures the Orient became a complex fantasy that allowed them to overcome something objectionable, either in themselves or in the culture of which they were a part, in order to attain some freer, more genuine form of philosophical, religious, or artistic expression."--From publisher description The Eighteenth Century : From Politics To Theology -- The Nineteenth Century : From Theology To Scholarship -- The Fin De Siecle : From Scholarship To Aesthetics -- The Twentieth Century I : From Aesthetics To Modernism -- The Twentieth Century Ii : From Modernism To Mass Culture -- Afterword. David Weir. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.