Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) was an international writer best known for his books about Japan. Born on the Greek island of Lefkáda, the son of an Irish father and a Greek mother, he was raised in England, Ireland, and France and immigrated to the United States at age 19. He lived first in Cincinnati, where he landed a job as a journalist, and then moved to New Orleans in 1877, where he wrote for several newspapers. His impressionistic writings about the city caught the eye of editors at Harper's Magazine, which in 1887 sent Hearn to the West Indies as a correspondent. The first part of this book is an account of Hearn's "midsummer trip to the tropics," which took him from New York to the Lesser Antilles, with stops in Saint Kitts, Dominica, Martinique, Barbados, Guyana, Trinidad, Grenada, and Saint Lucia. Hearn was captivated by the French-ruled island of Martinique and its people, where he came to live for two years. The second part of the book consists of 14 sketches of the island, all with French or Creole titles. The book includes photographs, drawings, and an appendix that discusses the music of Martinique and reproduces the melody and lyrics of several Creole songs. In 1890, the year this work was published, Hearn traveled to Japan, where he eventually settled, married a Japanese woman, and became a naturalized Japanese citizen.

A midsummer trip to the tropics.--Martinique sketches.--Appendix: Some Creole melodies.

In October 1887 the writer and translator Lafcadio Hearn sailed from New York to Martinique. Intending to stay for a few months, he remained for two years. He viewed French-ruled Martinique as an exotic fusion of European, African and Asian influences, the Creole society par exellence. Describing the island's landscape, its flora and fauna, its colonial architecture and rural villages, he provides a picture of a Caribbean colony where slavery was a recent memory and race an all-importan matter of identity.

It is remarkable how persistent a "minor" writer may be. He may lack the large vision and universal message of the great writer, but instead possess a clear, true, intense view of particular places, peoples, and situations that renders his work unique and irreplacable. Lafcadio Hearn (18501904) is such a figure in American literature. Best known as a scholar of Japanese culture, Hearn was a remarkable journalist, translator, travel writer, and perhaps second only to Poe in the literature of the macabre and supernatural. Hearn's life, as strange and colorful as his work, is brilliantly recounted in Elizabeth Stevenson's sensitive and sympathetic biography. The range of Hearn's writing is reflected in the peripatetic course of his life. The son of an Irish father and a Greek mother, he was born on the Ionian island of Leucadia, was raised in Dublin, and came to America at the age of nineteen. His early career was spent as a journalist. Without a trace of condescension or pity he entered into the lives of the dock workers of Cincinnati, the Creoles of New Orleans and Martinique, and later the common villagers of Japan, describing how they lived and worked and what they believed. No mere seeker after the exotic, Hearn's immersion in Japanese culture following his emigration in 1890 was born of a profound affinity of mind and sensibility. In Japan, the clarity and force of his expression matured. Here Hearn found a beautifully ordered, artistically sensitive society, but one indifferent to individualism. In later years, he saw a society also increasingly susceptible to modern forces of authoritarianism, militarism, and xenophobia. Horrified by the dehumanizing potential of these forces, in East and West alike, Hearn remained acutely sensitive to the most minute experience. His study of Japanese folklore and his retelling of its tales and ghost stories combine insight into the universals of the larger human world with an exquisite appreciation of how small things matter. Elizabeth Stevenson's book is as much about the writer as the man. While giving an accurate measure of the scale of Hearn's achievement, she makes a compelling case for its artistry. Her reading demonstrates that his writings are not mere aids to the understanding of various cultures but ends in themselves. Hearn did not just translate the folklore of other cultures, he recreated it. The Grass Lark will interest literary scholars, American studies specialists, and folklorists. Elizabeth Stevenson held a variety of positions during her working life. She found a home at Emory University and retired as Candler Professor of American Studies in its graduate division, The Institute of the Liberal Arts. She is the author of Henry Adams and Babbitts and Bohemians, both available from Transaction.

Ottmar Ette’s TransArea proceeds from the thesis that globalization is not a recent phenomenon, but rather, a process of long duration that may be divided into four main phases of accelerated globalization. These phases connect our present, across the world’s widely divergent modern eras, to the period of early modern history. Ette demonstrates how the literatures of the world make possible a tangible perception of that which constitutes Life, both of our planet and on our planet, which may only be understood through the application of multiple logics. There is no substitute for the knowledge of literature: it is the knowledge of life, from life. This English translation will be of great interest to English-speaking scholars in the fields of Global and Area Studies, Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, History, Political Science, and many more. About the author Ottmar Ette has been Chair of Romance Literature at the University of Potsdam, Germany, since 1995. He is Honorary Member of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) (elected in 2014), member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (elected in 2013), and regular member of the Academia Europaea (since 2010).

The idea of universal rights is often understood as the product of Europe, but as Laurent Dubois demonstrates, it was profoundly shaped by the struggle over slavery and citizenship in the French Caribbean. Dubois examines this Caribbean revolution by focusing on Guadeloupe, where, in the early 1790s, insurgents on the island fought for equality and freedom and formed alliances with besieged Republicans. In 1794, slavery was abolished throughout the French Empire, ushering in a new colonial order in which all people, regardless of race, were entitled to the same rights. But French administrators on the island combined emancipation with new forms of coercion and racial exclusion, even as newly freed slaves struggled for a fuller freedom. In 1802, the experiment in emancipation was reversed and slavery was brutally reestablished, though rebels in Saint-Domingue avoided the same fate by defeating the French and creating an independent Haiti. The political culture of republicanism, Dubois argues, was transformed through this transcultural and transatlantic struggle for liberty and citizenship. The slaves-turned-citizens of the French Caribbean expanded the political possibilities of the Enlightenment by giving new and radical content to the idea of universal rights.

Excerpt from Two Years in the French West Indies Some of the literary results of that sojourn form the bulk of the present volume. Several, or portions of several, papers have been published in harper's mag azin_e; but the majority of the sketches now appear in print for.the first time. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The first full length inter-disciplinary book to be published on this subject in English, it examines the relationship between politics and society in all three of France's overseas departments in the Caribbean. It has contributions on other salient features of French West Indian society and culture: class and ethnicity, the position of women, relations with Europe, with other Caribbean countries and with the French West Indian community in France. In addition there are also chapters on French West Indian literature and the principal theories of identity in the region, Negritude, Antillanite and Creolite. Among the contributors are French West Indian, British and Jamaican scholars.