New Book publication: The Neo-Buddhist Writings of Lafcadio Hearn – Light from the East by Antony Goedhals

New Book publication: The Neo-Buddhist Writings of Lafcadio Hearn – Light from the East by Antony Goedhals

The Faculty of Humanities would like to extend its congratulations to Dr Antony Goedhals from the English Department for his book The Neo-Buddhist Writings of Lafcadio Hearn: Light from the East. Dr Goedhals has published before on Hearn, including ‘Revisioning Reality: Transcending Space and Time in the Buddhist Writings of Lafcadio Hearn’ and ‘Lafcadio Hearn's Odyssey: A Home at the End of the World’.

The book – based on his PhD – was published in April 2020 by the Dutch publisher Brill. It looks at the writings of Hearn, a Victorian author who lived in America and Japan. Dr Goedhals became interested in Hearn while researching Buddhism in Victorian and Modernist literature. He was particularly drawn to Gleanings in Buddha-Fields, one of Hearn’s most overtly Buddhist books. For Goedhals, it is important to shed light on Hearn’s writings – and particularly on the hitherto overlooked Buddhism of the work – because he deserves to be appreciated for the way he ‘used his imagination to broaden the boundaries of possibility, and reflect upon the nature of reality’, as Goedhals puts it.

Hearn, it transpires in the book, was one of the first Western writers to experiment with, and adopt, Buddhism into his vision of the world – which caused a lot of trouble from Christian writers and critics who objected mostly to the writer’s atheism. The result of this is that while Hearn’s work has remained very popular in Japan, it has all but been forgotten in the West.

This book is the first examination of the Buddhism hidden in plain sight in Hearn’s writings. Goedhals shows that reality and imagination are not two separate magisteria but that they can, and do, overlap. For him ‘The best and most astounding things are hidden and require passionate persistence to get at’. These are two of the lessons he learnt from Hearn and hopes to pass on to the readers.

He may be finished with Hearn but he is not done with the vision Hearn helped to bring to the West. He is hoping to write about other writers who were ahead of their times, and we cannot wait to see what he does.