Writing China : Essays on the Amherst Embassy (1816) and Sino-British Cultural Relations / edited by Peter J. Kitson and Robert Markley for the English Association.
'Lost Horizon': Orientalism and the Question of Tibet / Q.S. Tong. Urbanization, Generic Forms, and Early Modernity: A Correlative Comparison of Wu Cheng'en and Spenser's Rural-Pastoral Poems / Mingjun Lu -- Master Zhuang's Wife: Translating the Ephseian Matron in Thomas Percy's The Matrons (1762) / Eun Kyung Min -- The Dark Gift: Opium, John Francis Davis, Thomas De Quincey, and the Amherst Embassy to China of 1816 / Peter J. Kitson -- The Amherst Embassy in the Shadow of Tambora: Climate and Culture, 1816 / Robert Markley -- Tea and the Limits of Orientalism in De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater / Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins -- Binding and Unbinding Chinese Feet in the Mid-Century Victorian Press / Elizabeth Chang -- Elective Affinities? Two Moments of Encounter with Oscar Wilde's Writings / Zhang Longxi -- 'Lost Horizon': Orientalism and the Question of Tibet / Q.S. Tong.
Summary:
On 29 August 1816, Lord Amherst, exhausted after travelling overnight during an embassy to China, was roughly handled in an attempt to compel him to attend an immediate audience with the Jiaqing Emperor at the Summer palace of Yuanming Yuan. Fatigued and separated from his ambassadorial and credentials, Amherst resisted, and left the palace in anger. The emperor, believing he had been insulted, dismissed the embassy without granting it an imperial audience and rejected its "tribute" of gifts. This diplomatic incident caused considerable disquiet at the time. Some 200 years later, it is timely in 2016 to consider once again the complex and vexed historical and cultural relations between two of the nineteenth-century world's largest empires. The interdisciplinary essays in this volume engage with the most recent work on British cultural representations of, and exchanges with, Qing China, extending our existing but still provisional understandings of this area of study in new and exciting directions. They cover such subjects as female foot binding; English and Chinese pastoral poetry; translations; representations of the trade in tea and opium; Tibet; and the political, cultural and environmental contexts of the Amherst embassy itself. Featuring British and Chinese writers such as Edmund Spenser, Wu Chengʻen, Thomas De Quincey, Oscar Wilde, James Hilton, and Zhuangzi, these essays take forward the compelling and highly relevant subject for today of Britain and China's relationship. -- Back cover.
Series:
Essays and Studies 2016 is volume sixty-nine in the new series of Essays and studies collected on behalf of the English Association, 0071-1357
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.