A Taste For China

'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.

Challenging existing narratives of the relationship between China and Europe, this study establishes how modern English identity evolved through strategies of identifying with rather than against China. Through an examination of England's obsession with Chinese objects throughout the long eighteenth century, A Taste for China argues that chinoiserie in literature and material culture played a central role in shaping emergent conceptions of taste and subjectivity. Informed by sources as diverse as the writings of John Locke, Alexander Pope, and Mary Wortley Montagu, Zuroski begins with a consideration of how literature transported cosmopolitan commercial practices into a model of individual and collective identity. She then extends her argument to the vibrant world of Restoration comedy-most notably the controversial The Country Wife by William Wycherley-where Chinese objects are systematically associated with questionable tastes and behaviors. Subsequent chapters draw on Defoe, Pope, and Swift to explore how adventure fiction and satirical poetry use chinoiserie to construct, question, and reimagine the dynamic relationship between people and things. The second half of the eighteenth century sees a marked shift as English subjects anxiously seek to separate themselves from Chinese objects. A reading of texts including Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Jonas Hanway's Essay on Tea shows that the enthrallment with chinoiserie does not disappear, but is rewritten as an aristocratic perversion in midcentury literature that prefigures modern sexuality. Ultimately, at the century's end, it is nearly disavowed altogether, which is evinced in works like Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote and Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. A persuasively argued and richly textured monograph on eighteenth-century English culture, A Taste for China will interest scholars of cultural history, thing theory, and East-West relations.

Eighteenth-century consumers in Britain, living in an increasingly globalized world, were infatuated with exotic Chinese and Chinese-styled goods, art and decorative objects. However, they were also often troubled by the alien aesthetic sensibility these goods embodied. This ambivalence figures centrally in the period's experience of China and of contact with foreign countries and cultures more generally. David Porter analyzes the processes by which Chinese aesthetic ideas were assimilated within English culture. Through case studies of individual figures, including William Hogarth and Horace Walpole, and broader reflections on cross-cultural interaction, Porter's readings develop new interpretations of eighteenth-century ideas of luxury, consumption, gender, taste and aesthetic nationalism. Illustrated with many examples of Chinese and Chinese-inspired objects and art, this is a major contribution to eighteenth-century cultural history and to the history of contact and exchange between China and the West.

Discover the world of Chinese food through the pages of this beautiful little book. The combination of photography and easy recipes will inject the flavours and ingredients of the Orient straight into your home.

Featuring more than ninety recipes, Ken Hom's 'A Taste of China' offers a glimpse into Chinese culinary life, from the methods used in humble peasant kitchens to those employed by the Chinese Imperial Court.

This book examines the transformations in form, genre, and content of contemporary Chinese print media. It describes and analyses the role of post-reform social stratification in the media, focusing particularly on how the changing practices and institutions of the industry correspond to and accelerate the emergence of a relatively affluent urban leisure-reading market. It argues that this reinvention of Chinese print media vis-à-vis the creation of a post-socialist taste (class) culture is an essential part of the cultural and affective transformations in contemporary Chinese society, and demonstrates how the reinvention of such taste culture effectively creates, through new kinds of reading materials and carefully demarcated target audiences, a middle-class civility that serves as the locus of the new niche media market.