Britain's Chinese eye : literature, empire, and aesthetics in nineteenth-century Britain / Elizabeth Hope Chang.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Chang, Elizabeth Hope.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--19th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

Aesthetics, British--19th century.

Aesthetics, British.

Great Britain--Civilization--Chinese influences.

Great Britain.

Great Britain--Civilization--19th century.

China--In literature.

China.

China--In art.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (251 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, c2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Garden

Plate

Display case and den

Photograph.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [187]-227) and index.

ISBN:

9780804775878

0804775877

OCLC:

669512780