Writings about East Asia provide an invaluable archive to study 1890s understandings of cosmopolitanism. In this period that predated the extensive translation of East Asian literatures into English, the work of cultural and literary mediation was carried out largely by nonspecialists. Focusing on Japan and China respectively, this chapter compares the representation of East Asian cultures in Lafcadio Hearn’s Kokoro (1896) and Wo Chang’s Britain Through Chinese Spectacles (1897). Both writers sought to widen the aesthetic, ethical, and political horizons of English-speaking readers. This chapter argues for the need to look beyond orientalism in order to appreciate the complexity of writers’ critical engagement with cosmopolitanism, and to understand the aspirations and failures of cosmopolitanism in this period. 1890s writings about East Asia affected the world consciousness of the 1890s and simultaneously contributed to the processes of literary networking that opened English literature to wider exchanges and connections.

Chapter 2 surveys some different ways in which Asia features in the Irish literary imagination from Lafcadio Hearn and W. B. Yeats to the present. Ronan Sheehan’s Foley’s Asia, dealing with a celebrated nineteenth-century Irish sculptor of imperial monuments, and Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times, set in Hong Kong against the backdrop of a ‘rising China’, are its contemporary examples. In early twentieth-century writing, Asia represented an exotic non-modern alternative to Western modernity. Later, it served as a backdrop to the fall of the British Empire. More recently, it suggests a strange new hyper-modernity with which the West will have to catch up. In all versions, Asia is conceived somewhere between the exotic and apocalyptic, a world at once tantalizing and threatening.