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

Online ISBN:
9780804775878
Print ISBN:
9780804759458
Publisher:
Stanford University Press
Book

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

Elizabeth Hope Chang
Elizabeth Hope Chang
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Published:
20 April 2010
Online ISBN:
9780804775878
Print ISBN:
9780804759458
Publisher:
Stanford University Press

Abstract

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. The author 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 its 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.

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