Creolization in Lafcadio Hearn’s New Orleans and Martinique Writings
Abstract
Hitomi Nabae
Kobe City University of Foreign Studies
The word tsunami, now commonly used throughout the world, was, according to the OED, first used in the 1897 story ‘A Living God’ written by Lafcadio Hearn. He wrote this story in Japan soon after reading the breaking news about the tsunami that had killed more than 20,000 people in North Japan. Having been trained as a journalist for twenty years in America, it was no wonder that he responded so quickly to such a catastrophe. Moreover, his first novel was also about oceanic catastrophe: a decade earlier in New Orleans he had written Chita, a story about the Gulf storm of 1856 which had swept away a resort island and swallowed up its inhabitants and vacationers. While Hearn obviously utilizes the catastrophe to dramatize the miraculous moment of survival, he also experiments with his narrative voice to render reality more powerfully. These two stories of oceanic catastrophe well illustrate how he turns journalistic realism into legendary myth by framing it within cross-cultural allegories, which arguably is an essential technique that he consciously crafted and developed so as to effectively address the multi-cultural readers of the world.
References
Frost, O. W. 1958. Young Hearn. Tokyo: Hokuseido.
Gould, G. M. 1908. Concerning Lafcadio Hearn: with a Bibliography by Laura Stedman. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs.
Gould, G. M. 1922. La cuisine creole: a collection of culinary recipes from leading chefs and noted creole housewives, who have made New Orleans famous for its cuisine. 2d ed. New Orleans: F. F. Hansell. (Original work published 1886).
Gould, G. M. 1924. An American Miscellany. 2 vols. Ed. Albert Mordell. New York: Dodd Mead.
Hearn, L. 1925. Occidental Gleanings: Sketches and Essays Now First Collected. A. Mordell (ed). New York: Dodd Mead.
Hearn, L. 1933. Letters of Pagan. Detroit: Robert Bruna Powers.
Hearn, L. 1956. Newly Discovered Letters from Lafcadio Hearn to Dr. Rudolph Matas. I. Nishizaki (ed). Tokyo: Hokuseido.
Hearn, L. 1988. The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn. Large-Paper Edition. In Sixteen Volumes. [Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1922.] Tokyo: Rinsen.
Hearn, L. 2001a. Inventing New Orleans: Writings of Lafcadio Hearn. Ed. S. F. Starr. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Hearn, L. 2001b. Two Years in the French West Indies. [1886] New York: Interlink.
Hearn, L. 2002. Lafcadio Hearn’s America: Ethnographic Sketches and Editorials. S. J. Bronner (ed). Louisville: University Pres of Kentucky.
Hearn, L. 2003. Chita: a Memory of Last Island. [1890] D. LaBarre (ed). Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Hearn, L. 2009 Hearn: American Writings. C. Benfey (ed). Library of America. Literary Classics of the United States.
Hearn, L. 2013. ‘Gombo zhèbes.’: Little dictionary of Creole proverbs, selected from six Creole dialects. [1886] London: Forgotten Books.
Hardwig, B. 2013. Upon Provincialism: Southern Literature and National Periodical Culture, 1870-1900. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Hirakawa, S. (ed) 2000. Koizumi Yakumo Jiten [Reader’s Guide to Lafcadio Hearn]. Tokyo: Kobunsha.
Imafuku, R. 1994. Kureoru-shugi [The Heterology of Culture; the Creole-ism]. Tokyo: Seidosha.
Jones, G. 1999. Strange Talk: the Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Long, J. 1999. Literary New Orleans. Athens, Georgia: Hill Street Press.
Murray, P. 1993. A Fantastic Journey: The Life and Literature of Lafcadio Hearn. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
‘New Books’, in The New York Times 1 June 1890 http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F00B16F8395F10738DDDA80894DE405B8085F0D3
Stevenson, E. 1961. Lafcadio Hearn. New York: Macmillan.
Stevenson, E. 1999. The Grass Lark: A Study of Lafcadio Hearn. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, Macmillan.
Turner, A. 1969. ‘Introduction’, Chita: A Memory of Last Island. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Kobe City University of Foreign Studies Japan
Hitomi Nabae, Professor of American Literature and Comparative Literature at the Department of English Studies of the Kobe City University of Foreign Studies, holds the degree of Ph.D. in English from Stanford, as well as M.A. and B.A. from Kobe College, Nishinomiya, Japan. She is an author of a number of monographs, book chapters and journal articles (in English and in Japanese) dedicated to life and work of Lafcadio Hearn, Henry James, Walt Whitman and American women poets, as well as problem-oriented studies within the field of American literary and cultural studies.
The Copyright Holder of the submitted text is the Author. The Reader is granted the rights to use the material available in the RIAS websites and pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative CommonsAttribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0). Any commercial use requires separate written agreement with the Author and a proper credit line indicating the source of the original publication in RIAS.
- License
The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY 4.0 license.
- Author’s Warranties
The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.
If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution - By the same conditions 4.0 International".
ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).
- User Rights
Under the Creative Commons Attribution license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
- Co-Authorship
If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.
I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.
