Description
Book SynopsisStudies of the literature of the British imperialism too often focus on India to the exclusion of other areas. This book redresses the balance by demonstrating how integral China and the Chinese were to the British imagination and to globalization, literature, aesthetics and popular culture from the 1840s to 1911.
Trade Review'… an immensely valuable and rewarding piece of scholarship.' Mia Chen, Review 19
'Ross Forman's China and the Victorian Imagination compellingly exposes China's critical role in Britain's imperial self-fashioning … What Forman does exceptionally well - and what is perhaps the most important work of his book - is his careful but firm revision of a concept of Orientalism that has proven increasingly outdated and faulty.' Shanyn Fiske, Journal of British Studies
Table of ContentsIntroduction: topsy-turvy Britain and China; 1. The manners and customs of the modern Chinese: narrating China through the treaty ports; 2. Projecting from Possession Point: James Dalziel's chronicles of Hong Kong; 3. Peking plots: representing the Boxer Rebellion of 1900; 4. Britain 'knit and nationalised': Asian invasion novels in Britain, 1898–1914; 5. Staging the celestial; 6. A cockney Chinatown: the literature of Limehouse, London; Conclusion: no rest for the West.
