Description
Book SynopsisThe 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.
Trade ReviewAs impressively insightful and informative as it is deftly written and exceptionally well organized, "The English Renaissance and the Far East: Cross-Cultural Encounters" is an extraordinary work of original and seminal scholarship. * Midwest Book Review *
This book would be of interest to anyone who studies English Renaissance studies, East/West relationships, East Asian studies, and would also engage those interested in either early modern travel writing or Shakespearean performance history. . . . this study. . . stands as a well-researched and engagingly tenacious journey into a vexed but vital realm of cross-cultural inquiry. * Renaissance Quarterly *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments List of Figures Introduction: “What’s Past is Prologue” PART ONE: RENAISSANCE ENGLAND Chapter One: Decrypting Dee’s Dreams: An Elizabethan Magus and the Search for Cathay Chapter Two: “Dumb Shewes of (Dis)Curtesie”: England’s First Encounter with China Chapter Three: “Naturalised Japanners”: “Samurai William” and the English in Hirado, 1613–1623 PART TWO: THE ASIAN RENAISSANCE Chapter Four: (RE)MADE IN CHINA: Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century Chapter Five: “Sheikusupia to Nippon”: Paradox, Parody and Pastiche Afterword: The Rise of East Asia and the Future of Early Modern Studies Bibliography Index
