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.

Contributor DetailsIntroduction1. Reincarnation and Selfhood in Olive Schreiner's The Buddhist Priest's Wife and Undine Erin Louttit2. Shangri-La and Buddhism in James Hilton's Lost Horizon and W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood's The Ascent of F6 Lawrence Normand3. [A] 'ears of my ears': e. e. cummings' Buddhist prosody Erin Lafford and Emma Mason4. Zen Buddhism as Radical Conviviality in the Works of Henry Miller, Kenneth Rexroth, and Thomas Merton Manuel Yang5. Radical Occidentalism: The Zen Anarchism of Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen James Patrick Brown6. Buddhism, Madness and Movement: Triangulating Jack Kerouac's Belief System Bent Sørensen7. Biology, the Buddha and the Beasts: The Influence of Ernst Haeckel and Arthur Schopenhauer on Samuel Beckett's How It Is Andy Wimbush8. 'That Other Ocean': Buddhism, Vedanta, and The Perennial Philosophy in Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man Bidhan Roy9. Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior as Mahayana Meditation Sarah Gardam10. The Aesthetics of Compassion in Iris Murdoch's The Sea, the Sea Elena Spandri11. Strange Entanglements: Buddhism and Quantum Theory in Contemporary Nonfiction Sean MillerBibliography