A Taste for China

Abstract

A Taste for China offers an account of how literature of the long eighteenth century generated a model of English selfhood dependent on figures of China. It shows how various genres of writing in this period call upon “things Chinese” to define the tasteful English subject of modernity. Chinoiserie is no mere exotic curiosity in this culture, but a potent, multivalent sign of England’s participation in a cosmopolitan world order. By the end of the eighteenth century, not only are English homes filled with it, but so too are English selves. Literature’s gradual insistence that things Chinese are incompatible with English identity is part of a strategy for organizing this imaginary material as part of modern subjectivity. Orientalism does not inform the literary incorporation of China into English self-definition, but is instead one of its most lasting effects.

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