Ros Ballaster
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199234295
- eISBN:
- 9780191696657
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199234295.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature, 18th-century Literature
This chapter charts the tendency to represent China as a space of inauthenticity, or fictionality, that emerged in the 18th century with the decline in the dominance and credibility of Jesuit ...
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This chapter charts the tendency to represent China as a space of inauthenticity, or fictionality, that emerged in the 18th century with the decline in the dominance and credibility of Jesuit missionary reports. However, this new preoccupation with the fragility and ephemerality of ‘China’ paradoxically allowed it to continue to play a robust and elastic role in the British cultural imagination. The analysis of fictional texts about China contributes to the increasing seriousness with which the cult of ‘chinoiserie’ is being treated by economic and cultural historians. The chapter considers four groups of fictional sources, first, oriental tales with a ‘Chinese’ setting by Thomas–Simon Gueullette, ‘Hoamchi-Vam’, Thomas Percy, and Horace Walpole; second, the group of tragic plays about Chinese ‘orphans’ written by figures as diverse as Voltaire and Elkanah Settle; third, the representation of China as an empire of ‘Dulness’ in poetry and fiction relating to Alexander Pope's Dunciad; and fourth, published letters written in the voice of the Chinese informant, of which Oliver Goldsmith's Citizen of the World is the most impressive, if late, example.Less
This chapter charts the tendency to represent China as a space of inauthenticity, or fictionality, that emerged in the 18th century with the decline in the dominance and credibility of Jesuit missionary reports. However, this new preoccupation with the fragility and ephemerality of ‘China’ paradoxically allowed it to continue to play a robust and elastic role in the British cultural imagination. The analysis of fictional texts about China contributes to the increasing seriousness with which the cult of ‘chinoiserie’ is being treated by economic and cultural historians. The chapter considers four groups of fictional sources, first, oriental tales with a ‘Chinese’ setting by Thomas–Simon Gueullette, ‘Hoamchi-Vam’, Thomas Percy, and Horace Walpole; second, the group of tragic plays about Chinese ‘orphans’ written by figures as diverse as Voltaire and Elkanah Settle; third, the representation of China as an empire of ‘Dulness’ in poetry and fiction relating to Alexander Pope's Dunciad; and fourth, published letters written in the voice of the Chinese informant, of which Oliver Goldsmith's Citizen of the World is the most impressive, if late, example.
Margaret J. M. Ezell
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198183112
- eISBN:
- 9780191847158
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198183112.003.0018
- Subject:
- Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
An overview of the literature describing English encounters with foreign cultures, including captivity narratives from New England, the Barbary pirates, and encounters with Turks and the Ottoman ...
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An overview of the literature describing English encounters with foreign cultures, including captivity narratives from New England, the Barbary pirates, and encounters with Turks and the Ottoman Empire. Readers continued to enjoy travel narratives from earlier expeditions to China and Japan, which had established conventions of depicting the orient. Many of these volumes included engravings of exotic flora and fauna and native costumes.Less
An overview of the literature describing English encounters with foreign cultures, including captivity narratives from New England, the Barbary pirates, and encounters with Turks and the Ottoman Empire. Readers continued to enjoy travel narratives from earlier expeditions to China and Japan, which had established conventions of depicting the orient. Many of these volumes included engravings of exotic flora and fauna and native costumes.
