A. Critical and Comparative Studies

65. Flanagan, Kathleen Theresa. ‘The Orient as Pretext for Aesthetic Revolution in Modern Poetry in English’. PhD thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1987. Abstract in DAI 48/9: 2331A.

The first study to bring self-consciously post-structuralist methods to the discussion shows that Chinese and Japanese poetry and art have been used by English-language poets ‘to legitimize many of the poetic stances’ we now associate with Modernism. Places Pound’s work with East Asian materials in the context of writers such as Fenollosa (see D10) and Hearn (D9), ‘who saw the East as a peaceful, meditative, and spiritual alternative to a Western society . . . they found largely aggressive and acquisitive’. Includes discussion of the Orient as ‘other’ in the work of Fletcher, Lowell, Pound, Yeats, and others.