This collection of eleven essays concerns the movement of modernity in East-West literary criticism. Most of the contributions address particular cross-cultural relationships such as W. B. Yeats's interest in the noh play, Ezra Pound's imagism, and the influence of Zen aesthetics on Western poetry. The Western writers discussed range from Americans, including Emerson, Thoreau, Faulkner, Wright, and Snyder, to Europeans, such as Marcel Proust. The Eastern writers include Basho, Tanizaki, Lao Tzu, Wan Wei, Tagore, and Yone Noguchi.