The Far East and the English imagination, 1600-1730 / Robert Markley.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Markley, Robert, 1952-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--17th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

English literature--18th century--History and criticism.

East Asia--In literature.

East Asia.

East Asia--Civilization.

Civilization.

Great Britain--Civilization--East Asian influences.

Great Britain.

Physical Description:

viii, 316 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Summary:

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries China, Japan, and the Spice Islands dazzled the English imagination as insatiable markets for European goods and as vast, inexhaustible storehouses of spices and luxury wares. Robert Markley explores the significance of attitudes to the wealth and power of East Asia in rethinking conceptions of national and personal identity in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English literature. Alongside works by canonical English authors, this study examines the writings of Jesuit missionaries, Dutch merchants, and English and Continental geographers, who directly contended with the challenges that China and Japan posed to visions of Western cultural and technological superiority. Questioning conventional Eurocentric histories, Markley examines the ways in which the writings of Milton, Dryden, Defoe, and Swift deal with the complexities of a world in which England was marginalized and which, until 1800, was dominated - economically at least - by the empires of the Far East.

Contents:

Introduction: British literature of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties 1

1 The Far East, the East India Company, and the English imagination 30

2 China and the limits of Eurocentric history: Milton, the Jesuits, and the Jews of Kaifeng 70

3 "Prudently present your regular tribute": civility, ceremony, and European rivalry in Qing China 104

4 Heroic merchants: trade, nationalism, and abjection in Dryden's Amboyna 143

5 "I have now done with my island, and all manner of discourse about it": Crusoe's Farther Adventures in the Far East 177

6 "So inexhaustible a treasure of gold": Defoe, credit, and the romance of the South Seas 210

7 Gulliver, the Japanese, and the fantasy of European abjection 241

Epilogue: The ideology of trade 269.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 273-302) and index.

ISBN:

052181944X

OCLC:

62132878

Publisher Number:

9780521819442