ABSTRACT
Imaging China, in American literary texts, in historic popular culture, and in fi lm and TV, has taken any number of quite startling turns. How, quite, to account for Melville’s “China Aster” parable in his Mississippi rivernovel, The Confi dence-Man (1857), with its satire of Emersonian optimism and trust, or Whitman’s myth-centered “Down from the gardens of Asia descending” in “Passage to India” (1868, 1871)? How do Pound’s webs of China-reference in the Cantos (1915-) play as markers both of his interest in the Confucian and Han classics and the Atlantic and European modern movement? What, now, to make of the “China” values of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth (1931), her earnest chronicle of North Chinese peasantry which in large part won her the Nobel Prize in 1938?
