Encountering Buddhism in Twentieth-Century British and American Literature

Encountering Buddhism in Twentieth-Century British and American Literature explores the ways in which 20th-century literature has been influenced by Buddhism, and has been, in turn, a major factor in bringing about Buddhism's increasing spread and influence in the West. Focussing on Britain and the United States, Buddhism's influence on a range of key literary texts will be examined in the context of those societies' evolving modernity. Writers discussed include T. S. Eliot, Hermann Hesse, Virginia Woolf, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, J. D. Salinger, Iris Murdoch, Maxine Hong Kingston. This book brings together for the first time a series of context-rich interpretations that demonstrate the importance of literature in this ongoing cultural change in Britain and the United States.

Alison Winch is lecturer in Cultural Studies at Middlesex University, UK.

Lawrence Normand is Principal Lecturer in English Literature at Middlesex University, UK.

Contributor Details
Introduction
1. Reincarnation and Selfhood in Olive Schreiner's The Buddhist Priest's Wife and Undine
Erin Louttit
2. Shangri-La and Buddhism in James Hilton's Lost Horizon and W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood's The Ascent of F6
Lawrence Normand
3. [A] 'ears of my ears': e. e. cummings' Buddhist prosody
Erin Lafford and Emma Mason
4. Zen Buddhism as Radical Conviviality in the Works of Henry Miller, Kenneth Rexroth, and Thomas Merton
Manuel Yang
5. Radical Occidentalism: The Zen Anarchism of Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen
James Patrick Brown
6. Buddhism, Madness and Movement: Triangulating Jack Kerouac's Belief System
Bent Sørensen
7. Biology, the Buddha and the Beasts: The Influence of Ernst Haeckel and Arthur Schopenhauer on Samuel Beckett's How It Is
Andy Wimbush
8. 'That Other Ocean': Buddhism, Vedanta, and The Perennial Philosophy in Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man
Bidhan Roy
9. Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior as Mahayana Meditation
Sarah Gardam
10. The Aesthetics of Compassion in Iris Murdoch's The Sea, the Sea
Elena Spandri
11. Strange Entanglements: Buddhism and Quantum Theory in Contemporary Nonfiction
Sean Miller
Bibliography