Author Description
Fascinated And Often Baffled By China, Anglophone Writers Turned To Classics For Answers. In Poetry, Essays, And Travel Narratives, Ancient Greece And Rome Lent Interpretative Paradigms And Narrative Shape To Britain's Information On The Middle Kingdom. While Memoirists Of The Diplomatic Missions In 1793 And 1816 Used Classical Ideas To Introduce Chinese Concepts, Roman History Held Ominous Precedents For Sino-british Relations According To Edward Gibbon And Samuel Taylor Coleridge. John Keats Illuminated How Peculiar Such Contemporary Processes Of Orientalist Knowledge-formation Were. In Britain, Popular Opinion On Chinese Culture Wavered During The Nineteenth Century, As Charles Lamb And Joanna Baillie Demonstrated In Ekphrastic Responses To Chinoiserie. A Former Reverence For China Yielded Gradually To Hostility, And The Classical Inheritance Informed A National Identity-crisis Over Whether Britain's Treatment Of China Was Civilized Or Barbaric. Amidst This Uncertainty, The Melancholy Conclusion To Virgil's Aeneid Became The Master-text For Discussion Of British Conduct At The Summer Palace In 1860. Yet If Rome Was To Be The Model For The British Empire, Tennyson, Sara Coleridge, And Thomas De Quincey Found Closer Analogues For The Opium Wars In Greek Tragedy And Homeric Epic. Meanwhile, Sinology Advanced Considerably During The Victorian Age. Britain Broadened Its Horizons By Interrogating The Cultural Past Anew As It Turned To Asia; Anglophone Readers Were Cosmopolitans In Time As Well As Space, Aggregating Knowledge Of Periclean Athens, Imperial Rome, And Many Other Polities In Their Encounters With Qing Dynasty China.
Menrva's Summary
THE THESIS
This work investigates how Anglophone writers utilized the intellectual frameworks of classical Greece and Rome to interpret, categorize, and ultimately shape British perceptions of Qing Dynasty China. Chris Murray, a scholar of literature and history, examines a wide array of primary sources including poetry, diplomatic memoirs, and travel narratives from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By analyzing these texts, the author argues that the classical tradition provided a necessary, albeit often distorting, lens through which British observers attempted to reconcile their evolving relationship with the Middle Kingdom.
THE SCOPE MAP
What You Will Find
- Analysis of British diplomatic missions to China in 1793 and 1816.
- Examination of literary responses to Chinoiserie by figures such as Charles Lamb and Joanna Baillie.
- Discussion of the influence of Virgil, Homer, and Greek tragedy on British interpretations of the Opium Wars.
- Exploration of the shift in British public opinion from reverence to hostility toward China.
Scope Limits
- The study focuses primarily on British literary and intellectual responses rather than Chinese internal perspectives.
- The analysis is constrained to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, excluding modern geopolitical developments.
THE AUTHORITY PERSPECTIVE
Scholars in the fields of Victorian literature and postcolonial studies recognize this text for its rigorous archival research and its nuanced exploration of the intersection between classical reception and Orientalism. Readers frequently note the academic density of the prose, which serves as a specialized resource for those interested in the history of cross-cultural intellectual exchange.
Page Count:
272
Publication Date:
2020-01-01
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
ISBN-10:
0191079731
ISBN-13:
9780191079733
History
British History
Literary Criticism
Sinology