As Zhaoming Qian states in his introduction to this collection, modernist scholarship has been slow in coming to acknowledge the formative impact of interaction with China and Japan on Euro-American literary modernism. Modernism and the Orient is a welcome addition to this burgeoning field. There are essays on the major players, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and of course Ezra Pound, while its purview indicates scope for wider investigation.
When modernism erupted in the prewar years of the twentieth century, European artists already owed a debt to other civilizations. J. M. Whistler abandoned the mimetic narrative of Western realist painting for the asymmetric perspective and atmospheric mood of an Eastern aesthetic in the 1870s. Whistler discovered Chinese porcelain at the same time as Japanese prints, sparking the fin-de-siècle craze most famously attested to by Oscar Wilde's lament, “I find it harder and harder every day to...
