In the following essay, Stempel asserts that translations by Lafcadio Hearn served as an important source of Japanese style and technique for writers of the Imagist movement.

SOURCE: "Lafcadio Hearn's Translations and the Origins of Imagist Aesthetics," in Comparative Literature East and West: Traditions and Trends, edited by Cornelia N. Moore and Raymond A. Moody, The College of Languages, Linguistics and Literature, University of Hawaii and the East-West Center, 1989, pp. 31-7.

Lafcadio Hearn is a minor figure in American literary history, a transplanted exotic who flourished in the hot-house atmosphere of late nineteenth century aesthetic impressionism. But literary history, like political history or economic history, too often ignores what lies outside its self-defined limits. It constructs what it imagines is a temporal narrative of authors and works when it is, in fact, deciding in advance just which texts can be admitted into the canon of so-called "literary" documents...