Creolization in Lafcadio Hearn’s New Orleans and Martinique Writings

• Authors: Hitomi Nakamura Nabae
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

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.

• Publisher: University of Silesia Press
• Journal: Review of International American Studies
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 7
• Issue: 1

Dates

published

2014-05-15

Contributors

author

Hitomi Nakamura Nabae