Negotiations of the transPacific, United States-Japan divide in the writings of Lafcadio Hearn and Yone Noguchi

Lafcadio Hearn and Yone Noguchi were both writers of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who crossed the Pacific---with Hearn leaving America for Japan and Noguchi traveling in the other direction---and gained critical and popular recognition for their works about the worlds that they encountered. This thesis employs a transnational, cross-disciplinary approach and explores the dynamic and ambivalent interchange between their respective writings and the material conditions of their day. In light my reading of Hearn's and Noguchi's negotiations of the perceived East-West, Japan-U.S. divide, this thesis argues that both writers can be best understood as "hybrid figures," torn between the polarities of East and West, whose writings can reveal much about the beginnings of the Japanese-American relationship and the emergence of modernity in the Pacific.