Lafcadio Hearn, American Folklorist

Abstract

THE HISTORY OF THE DISCIPLINE OF FOLKLORE has been generally neglected, possibly because until recent times there have been no professional American folklorists, at least in the sense of being academically trained for their chosen field. The sole exception is the area of ballad studies, and it is also the best chronicled.' Otherwise it has been only in the last decade that much attention has been given to the important contributions made to folklore scholarship by the amateur or semiprofessional folklorists of the past, and generally these studies have been produced by nonfolklorists.2 Most of these articles have focused on those persons who did their work in the United States, tendency that is understandable since typically the folklore efforts of Americans in foreign lands were inferior to those of their colleagues back home. Certainly this rule holds for the numerous works on Oriental folklore produced by nineteenth-century Americans. Of the many books dealing with the traditions of China and Japan issued by United States citizens during the latter part of the nineteenth century no more than dozen are of any value, and the vast majority of these are the work of Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904). Actually Hearn, who is cited by Richard Dorson as a trustworthy guide into unfamiliar corridors of Japanese folk ideas,' was citizen of the United