Britain's Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain

✍ Scribed by Elizabeth Chang

Year: 2010
Tongue: English
Leaves: 251
Edition: 1
Category: Library

No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.

✦ Synopsis

This book traces the intimate connections between Britain and China throughout the nineteenth century and argues for China's central impact on the British visual imagination. Chang brings together an unusual group of primary sources to investigate how nineteenth-century Britons looked at and represented Chinese people, places, and things, and how, in the process, ethnographic, geographic, and aesthetic representations of China shaped British writers' and artists' vision of their own lives and experiences. For many Britons, China was much more than a geographical location; it was also a way of seeing and being seen that could be either embraced as creative inspiration or rejected as contagious influence. In both cases, the idea of China's visual difference stood in negative contrast to Britain's evolving sense of the visual and literary real. To better grasp what Romantic and Victorian writers, artists, and architects were doing at home, we must also understand the foreign "objects" found in their midst and what they were looking at abroad.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents......Page 10
Introduction......Page 14
1. Garden......Page 36
Sir William Chambers and the Dissertation on Oriental Gardening......Page 41
The Macartney Mission of 1793 and the Qing Imperial Gardens......Page 50
Robert Fortune as Horticultural Spy in Racial Disguise......Page 69
2. Plate......Page 84
Romantic Satires on Blue and White China......Page 88
The Willow Pattern and George Meredith’s The Egoist......Page 101
Whistler and Rossetti as Collectors of Blue and White Porcelain......Page 110
3. Display Case and Den......Page 124
Exhibiting China in Victorian London......Page 128
Display Cases and Opium Dens in The Mystery of Edwin Drood......Page 138
Edwin Drood’s Inheritors......Page 146
4. Photograph......Page 154
Felice Beato and the Second Opium War......Page 159
Through China with John Thomson’s Camera......Page 165
“A Truthful Impression of the Country”: Isabella Bird......Page 176
Conclusion......Page 192
Notes......Page 200
Works Cited......Page 232
Index......Page 242

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