''At the end of the nineteenth century, Lafcadio Hearn was one of
America’s best-known writers, one of a stellar company that included
Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Twain, Poe, and
Stevenson have entered the established literary canon and are still
read for duty and pleasure. Lafcadio Hearn has been forgotten, with two
remarkable exceptions: in Louisiana and in Japan. Yet Hearn’s place in
the canon is significant for many reasons, not least of which is how the
twentieth century came to view the nineteenth. This view, both academic
and popular, reflects the triumph of a certain futuristic Modernism
over the mysteries of religion, folklore, and what was once called “folk
wisdom.” To witness this phenomenon in time-lapse, sped-up motion, one
need only consider Lafcadio Hearn, the Greek-born, Irish-raised, New
World immigrant who metamorphosed from a celebrated fin-de-siècle
American writer into the beloved Japanese cultural icon Koizumi Yakumo
in less than a decade, in roughly the same time that Japan changed from a
millennia-old feudal society into a great industrial power..''
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