“Une origine oubliée”: Global Modernity and East-West Debates over Classical Heritage

Abstract Analogies between the ancient Mediterranean and premodern China and Japan are a well-noted phenomenon in literary studies. Recently, a wealth of scholarship has reignited interest in how people from either side of the Eurasian continent sought to understand one another through comparisons between an imagined shared antiquity. Yet less work has been done comparing Eastern and Western ways of conceiving this analogy with current work in comparative literature. This essay considers late nineteenth- through early twentieth-century East Asian and Western analogies between classical East Asian and ancient Mediterranean cultures. Looking at examples from literature, philosophy, and fine art, it shows that making analogies between classical Chinese and Japanese cultures and ancient Greece and Rome was a shared strategy among prominent European and East Asian figures seeking to renew national traditions by reimagining the origins of both “East” and “West.” However fantastical, these imagined shared histories, seen in the work of Ernest Fenollosa, Watsuji Testurō, W. B. Yeats, and Kuki Shūzō, are an important point of contact between the conceptual foundations of East Asian and Western modernities, and an important element of the study of modernism itself.