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The Far East And The English Imagination 1600 1730
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Book Synopsis The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600-1730 by : Robert Markley
Download or read book The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600-1730 written by Robert Markley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-12 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 2006 investigation of the idea of the powerful Asian empires in the works of Milton, Dryden, Defoe and Swift.
Book Synopsis The English Renaissance and the Far East by : Adele Lee
Download or read book The English Renaissance and the Far East written by Adele Lee and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-10-25 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The English Renaissance and the Far East: Cross-Cultural Encounters is an original and timely examination of cultural encounters between Britain, China, and Japan. It challenges accepted, Anglocentric models of East-West relations and offers a radical reconceptualization of the English Renaissance, suggesting it was not so different from current developments in an increasingly Sinocentric world, and that as China, in particular, returns to a global center-stage that it last occupied pre-1800, a curious and overlooked synergy exists between the early modern and the present. Prompted by the current eastward tilt in global power, in particular towards China, Adele Lee examines cultural interactions between Britain and the Far East in both the early modern and postmodern periods. She explores how key encounters with and representations of the Far East are described in early modern writing, and demonstrates how work of that period, particularly Shakespeare, has a special power today to facilitate encounters between Britain and East Asia. Readers will find the past illuminating the present and vice versa in a book that has at its heart resonances between Renaissance and present-day cultural exchanges, and which takes a cyclical, “long-view” of history to offer a new, innovative approach to a subject of contemporary importance.
Book Synopsis Western Visions of the Far East in a Transpacific Age, 1522-1657 by : Christina H. Lee
Download or read book Western Visions of the Far East in a Transpacific Age, 1522-1657 written by Christina H. Lee and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-17 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing to bear the latest developments across various areas of research and disciplines, this collection provides a broad perspective on how Western Europe made sense of a complex, multi-faceted, and by and large Sino-centered East and Southeast Asia. The volume covers the transpacific period--after Magellan's opening of the transpacific route to the Far East and before the eventual dominance of the region by the British and the Dutch. In contrast to the period of the Enlightenment, during which Orientalist discourses arose, this initial period of encounters and conquest is characterized by an enormous curiosity and a desire to seize--not only materially but intellectually--the lands and peoples of East Asia. The essays investigate European visions of the Far East--particularly of China and Japan--and examine how and why particular representations of Asians and their cultural practices were constructed, revised, and adapted. Collectively, the essays show that images of the Far East were filtered by worldviews that ranged from being, on the one hand, universalistic and relatively equitable towards cultures to the other extreme, unilaterally Eurocentric.
Book Synopsis The Chinese Impact upon English Renaissance Literature by : Mingjun Lu
Download or read book The Chinese Impact upon English Renaissance Literature written by Mingjun Lu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Chinese Impact upon English Renaissance Literature examines how English writers responded to the cultural shock caused by the first substantial encounter between China and Western Europe. Author Mingjun Lu explores how Donne and Milton came to be aware of England’s participation in ’the race for the Far East’ launched by Spain and Portugal, and how this new global awareness shaped their conceptions of cultural pluralism. Drawing on globalization theory, a framework that proves useful to help us rethink the literary world of Renaissance England in terms of global maritime networks, Lu proposes the concept of ’liberal cosmopolitanism’ to study early modern English engagement with the other. The advanced culture of the Chinese, Lu argues, inculcated in Donne and Milton a respect for difference and a cosmopolitan curiosity that ultimately led both authors to reflect in profound and previously unexamined ways upon their Eurocentric and monotheistic assumptions. The liberal cosmopolitan model not only opens Renaissance literary texts to globalization theory but also initiates a new way of thinking about the early modern encounter with the other beyond the conventional colonial/postcolonial, nationalist, and Orientalist frameworks. By pushing East-West contact back to the period in 1570s-1670s, Lu’s work uncovers some hitherto unrecognized Chinese elements in Western culture and their shaping influence upon English literary imagination.
Book Synopsis The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia by : D. Johanyak
Download or read book The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia written by D. Johanyak and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-03-29 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique collection of essays examines the complex significations of 'Asia' in the literary and cultural production of Early Modern England. Contributors come from a range of backgrounds to bring a range of perspectives to this topic.
Book Synopsis A Taste for China by : Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins
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.
Book Synopsis Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia by : Su Fang Ng
Download or read book Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia written by Su Fang Ng and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-04 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No figure has had a more global impact than Alexander the Great, whose legends have encircled the globe and been translated into a dizzying multitude of languages, from Indo-European and Semitic to Turkic and Austronesian. Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia examines parallel traditions of the Alexander Romance in Britain and Southeast Asia, demonstrating how rival Alexanders - one Christian, the other Islamic - became central figures in their respective literatures. In the early modern age of exploration, both Britain and Southeast Asia turned to literary imitations of Alexander to imagine their own empires and international relations, defining themselves as peripheries against the Ottoman Empire's imperial center: this shared classical inheritance became part of an intensifying cross-cultural engagement in the encounter between the two, allowing a revealing examination of their cultural convergences and imperial rivalries and a remapping of the global literary networks of the early modern world. Rather than absolute alterity or strangeness, the narrative of these parallel traditions is one of contact - familiarity and proximity, unexpected affinity and intimate strangers.
Book Synopsis A Companion to British Literature, Volume 3 by : Robert DeMaria, Jr.
Download or read book A Companion to British Literature, Volume 3 written by Robert DeMaria, Jr. and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-12-13 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to British Literature, The Long Eighteenth Century, 1660 - 1830
Download or read book The Age of Silver written by Ning Ma and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book advances a "horizontal" method of comparative literature and applies this approach to analyze the multiple emergences of early realism and novelistic modernity in Eastern and Western cultural spheres from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Naming this era of economic globalization the 'Age of Silver,' this study emphasizes the bullion flow from South America and Japan to China through international commerce, and argues that the resultant transcontinental monetary and commercial co-evolutions stimulated analogous socioeconomic shifts and emergent novelistic realisms in places such as China, Japan, Spain, and England. The main texts it addresses include The Plum in the Golden Vase (anonymous, China, late sixteenth century), Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes, Spain, 1605 and 1615), The Life of an Amorous Man (Ihara Saikaku, Japan, 1682), and Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe, England, 1719). These Eastern and Western narratives indicate from their own geographical vantage points commercial expansions' stimulation of social mobility and larger processes of cultural destabilization. Their realist tendencies are underlain with politically critical functions and connote "heteroglossic" national imaginaries. This horizontal argument realigns novelistic modernity with a multipolar global context and reestablishes commensurabilities between Eastern and Western literary histories. On a broader level, it challenges the unilateral equation between globalization and modernity with westernization, and foregrounds a polycentric mode of global early modernity for pluralizing the genealogy of 'world literature' and historical transcultural relations"
Book Synopsis Early Encounters between East Asia and Europe by : Ralf Hertel
Download or read book Early Encounters between East Asia and Europe written by Ralf Hertel and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-07-14 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While inquiries into early encounters between East Asia and the West have traditionally focused on successful interactions, this collection inquires into the many forms of failure, experienced on all sides, in the period before 1850. Countering a tendency in scholarship to overlook unsuccessful encounters, it starts from the assumption that failures can prove highly illuminating and provide valuable insights into both the specific shapes and limitations of East Asian and Western imaginations of the Other, as well as of the nature of East-West interaction. Interdisciplinary in outlook, this collection brings together the perspectives of sinology, Japanese and Korean studies, historical studies, literary studies, art history, religious studies, and performance studies. The subjects discussed are manifold and range from missionary accounts, travel reports, letters and trade documents to fictional texts as well as material objects (such as tea, chinaware, or nautical instruments) exchanged between East and West. In order to avoid a Eurocentric perspective, the collection balances approaches from the fields of English literature, Spanish studies, Neo-Latin studies, and art history with those of sinology, Japanese studies, and Korean studies. It includes an introduction mapping out the field of failures in early modern encounters between East Asia and Europe, as well as a theoretically minded essay on the lessons of failure and the ethics of cross-cultural understanding.
Book Synopsis The Stillbirth of Capital by : Siraj Ahmed
Download or read book The Stillbirth of Capital written by Siraj Ahmed and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2011-12-14 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book targets one of the humanities' most widely held premises: namely, that the European Enlightenment laid the groundwork for modern imperialism. It argues instead that the Enlightenment's vision of empire calls our own historical and theoretical paradigms into question. While eighteenth-century British India has not received nearly the same attention as nineteenth- and twentieth-century empires, it is the place where colonial rule and Enlightenment reason first became entwined. The Stillbirth of Capital makes its case by examining every work about British India written by a major author from 1670 to 1815, a period that coincides not only with the Enlightenment but also with the institution of a global economy. In contrast to both Marxist and liberal scholars, figures such as Dryden, Defoe, Voltaire, Sterne, Smith, Bentham, Burke, Sheridan, and Scott locate modernity's roots not in the birth of capital but rather in the collusion of sovereign power and monopoly commerce, which used Indian Ocean wealth to finance the unfathomable costs of modern war. Ahmed reveals the pertinence of eighteenth-century writing to our own moment of danger, when the military alliance of hegemonic states and private corporations has become even more far-reaching than it was in centuries past.
Book Synopsis East Meets West in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times by : Albrecht Classen
Download or read book East Meets West in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times written by Albrecht Classen and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-09-03 with total page 827 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new volume explores the surprisingly intense and complex relationships between East and West during the Middle Ages and the early modern world, combining a large number of critical studies representing such diverse fields as literary (German, French, Italian, English, Spanish, and Arabic) and other subdisciplines of history, religion, anthropology, and linguistics. The differences between Islam and Christianity erected strong barriers separating two global cultures, but, as this volume indicates, despite many attempts to 'Other' the opposing side, the premodern world experienced an astonishing degree of contacts, meetings, exchanges, and influences. Scientists, travelers, authors, medical researchers, chroniclers, diplomats, and merchants criss-crossed the East and the West, or studied the sources produced by the other culture for many different reasons. As much as the theoretical concept of 'Orientalism' has been useful in sensitizing us to the fundamental tensions and conflicts separating both worlds at least since the eighteenth century, the premodern world did not quite yet operate in such an ideological framework. Even though the Crusades had violently pitted Christians against Muslims, there were countless contacts and a palpitable curiosity on both sides both before, during, and after those religious warfares.
Book Synopsis Singular Case by : Ashley Eva Millar
Download or read book Singular Case written by Ashley Eva Millar and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2017-03-22 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China held a unique place in European thought during the eighteenth century. Considered a relatively unknown but advanced agrarian and commercial civilization, the Chinese Empire represented the apex of an economic system that was only beginning to be supplanted. Europeans did not assume their superiority and were drawn to study the nature and organization of China’s economy. Analyzing the writings of early modern European travellers, missionaries, merchants, geographers, and philosophers, including Charles de Secondat, Denis Diderot, David Hume, François Quesnay, Abbé Raynal, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Voltaire, A Singular Case evaluates the circulation of information about the Chinese political economy that fed European imaginations. Ashley Millar examines perceptions of China’s science, technology, and moral and behavioural foundations, foreign trade policies, and the form and function of China’s government in order to question the extent to which consensus emerged on China’s successes and failures and to assess how knowledge of the Chinese system influenced the Enlightenment Shedding light on contemporary debates on the rise of the west and the Great Divergence from a historical vantage point, A Singular Case offers striking observations on Western views of early modern China.
Book Synopsis Ways of the World by : Laura J. Rosenthal
Download or read book Ways of the World written by Laura J. Rosenthal and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-15 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ways of the World explores cosmopolitanism as it emerged during the Restoration and the role theater played in both memorializing and satirizing its implications and consequences. Rooted in the Stuart ambition to raise the status of England through two crucial investments—global traffic, including the slave trade, and cultural sophistication—this intensified global orientation led to the creation of global mercantile networks and to the rise of an urban British elite who drank Ethiopian coffee out of Asian porcelain at Ottoman-inspired coffeehouses. Restoration drama exposed cosmopolitanism's most embarrassing and troubling aspects, with such writers as Joseph Addison, Aphra Behn, John Dryden, and William Wycherley dramatizing the emotional and ethical dilemmas that imperial and commercial expansion brought to light. Altering standard narratives about Restoration drama, Laura J. Rosenthal shows how the reinvention of theater in this period—including technical innovations and the introduction of female performers—helped make possible performances that held the actions of the nation up for scrutiny, simultaneously indulging and ridiculing the violence and exploitation being perpetuated. In doing so, Ways of the World reveals an otherwise elusive consistency between Restoration genres (comedy, tragedy, heroic plays, and tragicomedy), disrupts conventional understandings of the rise and reception of early capitalism, and offers a fresh perspective on theatrical culture in the context of the shifting political realities of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain.
Download or read book Novel Ventures written by Leah Orr and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2017-10-16 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eighteenth century British book trade marks the beginning of the literary marketplace as we know it. The lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695 brought an end to pre-publication censorship of printed texts and restrictions on the number of printers and presses in Britain. Resisting the standard "rise of the novel" paradigm, Novel Ventures incorporates new research about the fiction marketplace to illuminate early fiction as an eighteenth-century reader or writer might have seen it. Through a consideration of all 475 works of fiction printed over the four decades from 1690 to 1730, including new texts, translations of foreign works, and reprints of older fiction, Leah Orr shows that the genre was much more diverse and innovative in this period than is usually thought. Contextual chapters examine topics such as the portrayal of early fiction in literary history, the canonization of fiction, concepts of fiction genres, printers and booksellers, the prices and physical manufacture of books, and advertising strategies to give a more complex picture of the genre in the print culture world of the early eighteenth century. Ultimately, Novel Ventures concludes that publishers had far more influence over what was written, printed, and read than authors did, and that they shaped the development of English fiction at a crucial moment in its literary history.
Book Synopsis The First British Trade Expedition to China by : Nicholas D. Jackson
Download or read book The First British Trade Expedition to China written by Nicholas D. Jackson and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-01 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The First British Trade Expedition to China, Nicholas D. Jackson explores the pioneering British trade expedition to China launched in the late Ming period by Charles I and the Courteen Association. While utilizing the vivid and unique perspective of its commander, Captain John Weddell, this study concentrates on the fleet’s adventures in south China between Portuguese Macao and the provincial capital, Guangzhou (Canton). Tracing the obscure origins of Sino-British diplomatic and commercial relations back to the late Ming era, Jackson examines the first episodes of Sino-British interaction, exchange, and collision in the seventeenth century. His definitive narrative and original analysis constitute a groundbreaking study of early modern British initiatives and enterprise in the coastal areas of south China. The book begins by sketching the Tudor-Stuart historical background of British trade expansion in Asia before precisely reconstructing the voyages of East India Company and then Courteen ships to Guangdong province. The core of the narrative illuminates the communications, intrigues, and confrontations between Ming officials and the British commanders and merchants. The monograph concludes with an analysis outlining the major lessons learned by all the personalities and parties involved in those unprecedented encounters and clashes. Among other theses, Jackson argues that this expedition demonstrates that as early as the seventeenth century, a significant difference in naval-military strength and sophistication obtained between Great Britain and China. “This book presents vivid and arresting details highlighting the differences between the early modern and modern eras. It features quasi-piratical actions by men with the audacity to venture into unknown lands, who were on the one hand defrauded by ‘interpreters’ of dubious origin and ‘officials’ of unverified credentials, but nonetheless emerged from the fray with laden ships and the incremental knowledge that contributed to the subsequent economic dominance of Europe.” —Evelyn S. Rawski, University of Pittsburgh “In this lively account of Sino-British exchanges, Nicholas D. Jackson provides us with the first book-length narrative of the much-neglected Weddell voyage to China in 1637. Scholars of the British Empire and East-West interactions will find much relevance in this masterfully delivered dialogue between two contending world powers.” —Paul A. Van Dyke, author of The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast, 1700–1845
Download or read book Minds in Motion written by Anne M. Thell and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-31 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The central claim of Minds in Motion is that British travel writing of the long eighteenth century functions as an epistemological playing field where authors test empiricist models of engagement with the world while simultaneously seeking out the role of the self and the imagination in producing knowledge. Whether exploring the relationship between the senses and the mind, the narrative viability of experimental detachment, or the literary dynamics of virtual witnessing, eighteenth-century travel authors persistently confront their positionality and raise difficult questions about the nature and value of first-hand experience. In one way or another, they also complicate empiricist ideals by exploring the limits of individual perception and the role of the imagination in generating and relating knowledge. While the genre is often viewed as either numbingly documentary or non-literary and commercial, travel literature actually operates at the front line of the period’s intellectual developments, illustrating both how individual writers grapple with philosophical ideals and how these ideals filter into the lives of ordinary people. Indeed, travel literature directly engages the scientific and philosophical concerns of the period, while it is also widely, avidly read; as such, it offers models for cognitive and rhetorical practices that are evaluated and either embraced or rejected by readers (in a process of identification not unlike that which occurs in early English fiction). Moreover, because eighteenth-century travel literature is so crucial to the development of so many fields—from botany to the novel—it illustrates vividly the divisive energies of discipline and genre formation while also archiving the shared aims and methods of what will become discrete fields of study. Travelogues as diverse as Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World (1666) and Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) reveal the epistemological circuitry of the eighteenth century and historicize the absorption of the philosophical tendencies that have come to define modernity.
