Books and Habits, from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn

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About this book

Addressing Japanese students at the University of Tokyo, Lafcadio Hearn explains the habits and assumptions behind Western literature. These lectures, collected from student notes and introduced by John Erskine, ask how familiar poems and traditions appear to people educated in another culture. Hearn discusses love in English poetry, brief verse forms, the Bible's literary influence and the moral ideas that shape an author's work.

The comparisons reach beyond English writing to Greek fragments, Japanese subjects in foreign poems and the influence of Finnish poetry. In a discussion of poems about insects, Hearn considers how anthologies arrange their contents and why classification by subject matters to students. Readers interested in literary criticism will find a teacher connecting form with everyday beliefs, while the collection offers a way to examine cultural assumptions that can otherwise pass unnoticed.

About the author

Lafcadio Hearn

Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) was born in Greece to Irish and Greek parents, worked as a journalist in Cincinnati and New Orleans, then moved to Japan in 1890. He married Koizumi Setsu, took Japanese citizenship, and wrote a shelf of books interpreting the country for Western readers.