Download or read book Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem written by Robert Kern and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-04-26 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem is a critical and historical interpretation of "Oriental" influences on American modernist poetry. Kern equates Fenollosa and Pound's "discovery" of Chinese writing with the American pursuit of a natural language for poetry, what Emerson had termed the "language of nature." Through analysis and contextualization, Kern sheds light on the three contemporary nexuses of his search: the cultural study of Orientalism and the West, the evolution of Indo-European linguistic theory, and the intellectual tradition of American modernist poetry.