The Chinese Taste In Eighteenth Century England

Author : David Porter
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 0521192994
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.96/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England written by David Porter and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-11 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eighteenth-century consumers in Britain, living in an increasingly globalized world, were infatuated with exotic Chinese and Chinese-styled goods, art and decorative objects. However, they were also often troubled by the alien aesthetic sensibility these goods embodied. This ambivalence figures centrally in the period's experience of China and of contact with foreign countries and cultures more generally. David Porter analyzes the processes by which Chinese aesthetic ideas were assimilated within English culture. Through case studies of individual figures, including William Hogarth and Horace Walpole, and broader reflections on cross-cultural interaction, Porter's readings develop new interpretations of eighteenth-century ideas of luxury, consumption, gender, taste and aesthetic nationalism. Illustrated with many examples of Chinese and Chinese-inspired objects and art, this is a major contribution to eighteenth-century cultural history and to the history of contact and exchange between China and the West.

Author : Chi-ming Yang
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421404419
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Performing China written by Chi-ming Yang and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a model of economic and political strength, viewed by many as the greatest empire in the world. While the importance of China to eighteenth-century English consumer culture is well documented, less so is its influence on English values. Through a careful study of the literature, drama, philosophy, and material culture of the period, this book articulates how Chinese culture influenced English ideas about virtue. Discourses of virtue were significantly shaped by the intensified trade with the East Indies. Chi-ming Yang focuses on key forms of virtue—heroism, sincerity, piety, moderation, sensibility, and patriotism—whose meanings and social importance developed in the changing economic climate of the period. She highlights the ways in which English understandings of Eastern values transformed these morals. The book is organized by type of performance—theatrical, ethnographic, and literary—and by performances of gender, identity fraud, and religious conversion. In her analysis of these works, Yang brings to light surprising connections between figures as disparate as Confucius and a Chinese Amazon and between cultural norms as far removed as Hindu reincarnation and London coffeehouse culture. Part of a new wave of cross-disciplinary scholarship, where Chinese studies meets the British eighteenth century, this novel work will appeal to scholars in a number of fields, including performance studies, East Asian studies, British literature, cultural history, gender studies, and postcolonial studies.

Author : Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199950989
Total Pages : 297 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Taste for China written by Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-23 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A Taste for China' offers an account of how literature of the long eighteenth century generated a model of English selfhood dependent on figures of China. It shows how various genres of writing in this period call upon 'things Chinese' to define the tasteful English subject of modernity. Chinoiserie is no mere exotic curiosity in this culture, but a potent, multivalent sign of England's participation in a cosmopolitan world order.

Author : Stacey Sloboda
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780719089459
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.5X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Chinoiserie written by Stacey Sloboda and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-21 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a critical reassessment of chinoiserie, a style both praised and derided for its triviality, prettiness, and ornamental excesses, Stacey Sloboda argues that chinoiserie was no mute participant in eighteenth-century global consumer culture, but was instead a critical commentator on that culture. Analysing ceramics, wallpaper, furniture, garden architecture and other significant examples of British and Chinese design, this book takes an object-focused approach to studying the cultural phenomenon of the 'Chinese taste' in eighteenth-century Britain. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the critical history of design and the decorative arts in eighteenth-century Britain, and students and scholars of art history, material culture, eighteenth-century studies and British history will find a novel approach to studying the decorative arts and a forceful argument for their critical capacities.

Author : Elizabeth Chang
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0804775877
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Britain's Chinese Eye written by Elizabeth Chang and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-20 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199950997
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.97/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Taste for China written by Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-03 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging existing narratives of the relationship between China and Europe, this study establishes how modern English identity evolved through strategies of identifying with rather than against China. Through an examination of England's obsession with Chinese objects throughout the long eighteenth century, A Taste for China argues that chinoiserie in literature and material culture played a central role in shaping emergent conceptions of taste and subjectivity. Informed by sources as diverse as the writings of John Locke, Alexander Pope, and Mary Wortley Montagu, Zuroski Jenkins begins with a consideration of how literature transported cosmopolitan commercial practices into a model of individual and collective identity. She then extends her argument to the vibrant world of Restoration comedy-most notably the controversial The Country Wife by William Wycherley-where Chinese objects are systematically associated with questionable tastes and behaviors. Subsequent chapters draw on Defoe, Pope, and Swift to explore how adventure fiction and satirical poetry use chinoiserie to construct, question, and reimagine the dynamic relationship between people and things. The second half of the eighteenth century sees a marked shift as English subjects anxiously seek to separate themselves from Chinese objects. A reading of texts including Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Jonas Hanway's Essay on Tea shows that the enthrallment with chinoiserie does not disappear, but is rewritten as an aristocratic perversion in midcentury literature that prefigures modern sexuality. Ultimately, at the century's end, it is nearly disavowed altogether, which is evinced in works like Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote and Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. A persuasively argued and richly textured monograph on eighteenth-century English culture, A Taste for China will interest scholars of cultural history, thing theory, and East-West relations.

Author : Troy Bickham
Publisher : Reaktion Books
ISBN 13 : 1789142458
Total Pages : 286 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Eating the Empire written by Troy Bickham and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2020-04-13 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When students gathered in a London coffeehouse and smoked tobacco; when Yorkshire women sipped sugar-infused tea; or when a Glasgow family ate a bowl of Indian curry, were they aware of the mechanisms of imperial rule and trade that made such goods readily available? In Eating the Empire, Troy Bickham unfolds the extraordinary role that food played in shaping Britain during the long eighteenth century (circa 1660–1837), when such foreign goods as coffee, tea, and sugar went from rare luxuries to some of the most ubiquitous commodities in Britain—reaching even the poorest and remotest of households. Bickham reveals how trade in the empire’s edibles underpinned the emerging consumer economy, fomenting the rise of modern retailing, visual advertising, and consumer credit, and, via taxes, financed the military and civil bureaucracy that secured, governed, and spread the British Empire.

Author : James Noggle
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191635669
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Temporality of Taste in Eighteenth-Century British Writing written by James Noggle and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-09 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is taste a quick, momentary experience in the individual mind? Or something durable, shaped by slow, historical processes, affecting groups of people at different times and places? British writers in the eighteenth century believed that it was both, and the tension between these temporal poles shaped the meaning of taste in the period and set a course for aesthetics in following centuries. Focusing on works in many genres-Alexander Pope's poems, David Hume's historiography, essays by Hannah More and Anna Barbauld, and novels by Frances Burney and William Beckford-this book sees the divided temporality of taste as an unpredictable force in British writing. The eighteenth century was the age of taste. Writers considered its intense effects on individual minds as especially characteristic of the collective present of British modernity, whilst they also recognized the disturbing tendency of taste's immediacy and its historical roles to interrupt and foreclose on each other. While noting how taste's two temporal flavours may be made to agree in order to consolidate various national, social, and gendered identities, this book also demonstrates that taste's dual temporality makes it more disruptive than scholars usually think. As such, taste models a kind of critical practice that this book itself endeavours to inherit: the insistent testing of the moment of discernment and on-going patterns of thinking and feeling against each other.

Author : Eun Kyung Min
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108421938
Total Pages : 291 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book China and the Writing of English Literary Modernity, 1690–1770 written by Eun Kyung Min and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that eighteenth-century literature defined itself as 'English' and 'modern' by engaging with debates about Chinese history and culture.

Author : Eugenia Zuroski
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 9780190887438
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Taste for China written by Eugenia Zuroski and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2018-04 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging existing narratives of the relationship between China and Europe, this study establishes how modern English identity evolved through strategies of identifying with rather than against China. Through an examination of England's obsession with Chinese objects throughout the long eighteenth century, A Taste for China argues that chinoiserie in literature and material culture played a central role in shaping emergent conceptions of taste and subjectivity. Informed by sources as diverse as the writings of John Locke, Alexander Pope, and Mary Wortley Montagu, Zuroski begins with a consideration of how literature transported cosmopolitan commercial practices into a model of individual and collective identity. She then extends her argument to the vibrant world of Restoration comedy-most notably the controversial The Country Wife by William Wycherley-where Chinese objects are systematically associated with questionable tastes and behaviors. Subsequent chapters draw on Defoe, Pope, and Swift to explore how adventure fiction and satirical poetry use chinoiserie to construct, question, and reimagine the dynamic relationship between people and things. The second half of the eighteenth century sees a marked shift as English subjects anxiously seek to separate themselves from Chinese objects. A reading of texts including Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Jonas Hanway's Essay on Tea shows that the enthrallment with chinoiserie does not disappear, but is rewritten as an aristocratic perversion in midcentury literature that prefigures modern sexuality. Ultimately, at the century's end, it is nearly disavowed altogether, which is evinced in works like Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote and Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. A persuasively argued and richly textured monograph on eighteenth-century English culture, A Taste for China will interest scholars of cultural history, thing theory, and East-West relations.