The Chinese Impact Upon English Renaissance Literature

The Chinese Impact upon English Renaissance Literature examines how English writers responded to the cultural shock caused by the first substantial encounter between China and Western Europe. Author Mingjun Lu explores how Donne and Milton came to be aware of England’s participation in ’the race for the Far East’ launched by Spain and Portugal, and how this new global awareness shaped their conceptions of cultural pluralism. Drawing on globalization theory, a framework that proves useful to help us rethink the literary world of Renaissance England in terms of global maritime networks, Lu proposes the concept of ’liberal cosmopolitanism’ to study early modern English engagement with the other. The advanced culture of the Chinese, Lu argues, inculcated in Donne and Milton a respect for difference and a cosmopolitan curiosity that ultimately led both authors to reflect in profound and previously unexamined ways upon their Eurocentric and monotheistic assumptions. The liberal cosmopolitan model not only opens Renaissance literary texts to globalization theory but also initiates a new way of thinking about the early modern encounter with the other beyond the conventional colonial/postcolonial, nationalist, and Orientalist frameworks. By pushing East-West contact back to the period in 1570s-1670s, Lu’s work uncovers some hitherto unrecognized Chinese elements in Western culture and their shaping influence upon English literary imagination.

The 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.

This is a new release of the original 1934 edition.

England's Asian Renaissance explores how Asian knowledges, narratives, and customs inflected early modern English literature. Just as Asian imports changed England's tastes and enriched the English language, Eastern themes, characters, and motifs helped shape the country's culture and contributed to its national identity. Questioning long-standing dichotomies between East and West and embracing a capacious understanding of translatio as geographic movement, linquistic transformation, and cultural grafting, the collection gives pride of place to convergence, approximation, and hybridity, thus underscoring the radical mobility of early modern culture. In so doing, England's Asian Renaissance also moves away from entrenched narratives of Western cultural sovereignty to think anew England's debts to Asia. Published by the University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

The Vision of China is the first book on China as it came to be reflected in English literature. As such, it also offers the first comprehensive study of the image of China in Western literature. Featuring essays by prominent Chinese scholars such as Qian Zongshu, Fan Cunzhong, and Chen Shouyi, it complements such works as Pierre Martino's L'Orient dans la litterature francaise au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siecle (1906), Ursula Aurich's China im Spiegel der deutschen Literature des 18. Jahrhunderts (1935), and E. Horst Tscharner's China in der deutschen Dichtung bis zur Klassik (1939).Together with William W. Appleton's A Cycle of Cathay: The Chinese Vogue in England during the 17th and 18th Centuries (1951) and Raymond Dawson's The Chinese Chameleon: An Analysis of European Conceptions of Chinese Civilization (1967), the book studies the last phase of the Chinese mode in England. Some of the articles collected here actually inspired Appleton's study, at least in part.As a contemporary volume on the construct of China, The Vision of China can readily be considered the companion study to Edward Said's envisioned Orient in Orientalism (1979), to Tzvetan Todorov's Africa in Nous et les autres: la reflection francaise sur la diversite humaine (1989), and Gauri Viswanathan's Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (1989).

This unique collection of essays examines the complex significations of 'Asia' in the literary and cultural production of Early Modern England. Contributors come from a range of backgrounds to bring a range of perspectives to this topic.

In the late Qing period, from the Opium War to the 1911 revolution, China absorbed the initial impact of Western arms, manufactures, science and culture, in that order. This volume of essays deals with the reception of Western literature, on the evidence of translations made. Having to overcome Chinese assumptions of cultural superiority, the perception that the West had a literature worth notice grew only gradually. It was not until the very end of the 19th century that a translation of a Western novel ("La dame aux camelias") achieved popular acclaim. But this opened the floodgates: in the first decade of the 20th century, more translated fiction was published than original fiction.The core essays in this collection deal with aspects of this influx according to division of territory. Some take key works (e.g. Stowe s "Uncle Tom s Cabin, " Byron s The Isles of Greece ), some sample genres (science fiction, detective fiction, fables, political novels), the common attention being to the adjustments made by translators to suit the prevailing aesthetic, cultural and social norms, and/or the current needs and preoccupations of the receiving public. A broad overview of translation activities is given in the introduction.To present the subject in its true guise, that of a major cultural shift, supporting papers are included to fill in the background and to describe some of the effects of this foreign invasion on native literature. A rounded picture emerges that will be intelligible to readers who have no specialized knowledge of China.