Novissima Sinica

These two new volumes overlap considerably in terms of their subject matter, which is English notions about China during the long eighteenth century. Yet what they also have in common is that they participate in a relatively new trend in premodern East-West studies for showing how China influenced England in often unexpected and surprising ways. According to an older conceptual model, only recently displaced, England, or the West in general, was seen as the center of a wheel around which other cultures were merely spokes; these cultures may have had connections to the center, and, indeed, may have influenced it profoundly, but they remained largely extraneous or simply interesting, nonessential offshoots of the Great Western Tradition. Consider chinoiserie, formerly characterized as a superficial ornament only, or as something that as a matter of taste might wax and wane according to the dictates of contemporary fashion. More recent work has shown, however, that chinoiserie was far more essential to the history of Western art and culture than previously supposed, and, indeed, that its pervasiveness actually defined and changed the course of European art during the eighteenth century.

This older model has given way, in part, to a reversed view, whereby the same material was analyzed “from the other side,” thereby revealing perspectives that had been previously ignored or silenced. How did the Chinese react to England during the eighteenth century, for example? How might we describe the history of East-West relations from an Eastern perspective? What would English literature look like were it categorized according to East Asian tastes and periods rather than the other way around?

The two volumes under review here, however, take us in exciting new directions by asking us to think about how the encounter with China might actually have produced what we now think of as “Englishness.” Tea drinking, for instance, which David Porter examines in The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England, quickly transformed from being a Chinese luxury import into being a paradigmatically English cultural trait, one by which the English could define themselves. Precisely how and why did this occur?

Porter focuses much of his book on material things and asks analogous questions with respect to the English garden, also heavily influenced by chinoiserie landscaping styles. He considers the popularization of porcelain and chinaware, as well as such fashionable exotica as Buddha statues and Chinese-style fire screens. Chinese-inspired objects frequently featured scenes of benign smiling faces committed to lives of leisure, but they often depicted this as a world of women, too. These objects, Porter argues, helped to contribute to a process in which domestic spaces—as well as the rituals surrounding the brewing and drinking of tea—were even more thoroughly associated with femininity. Even more, how might eighteenth-century notions of women’s rights or of female utopias be seen as yet one more effect of England’s encounter with China? Like chinoiserie styles themselves, the “effeminacy” of China was both beautiful and monstrous, superficial and transgressive. Finally, Porter points out that just as the English Gothic incorporated “Chinese” elements into its characteristic Englishness, so may the sinophobic repudiation of Chinese styles, as they were understood in the West, have led, in part, to the development of English Romanticism.

Chi-ming Yang’s Performing China discusses a number of these same issues, such as chinoiserie and changing attitudes toward heroism and effeminacy during the period, but her real focus is English virtue. How might a paradigmatically English list of eighteenth-century virtues, including sentimentality, piety, and honor, have been influenced or even produced by England’s engagement with China and Chinese cultural representations? Yang begins by analyzing heroism in Elkanah Settle’s 1676 drama, The Conquest of China, which tells the story of the fall of the Ming dynasty, a subject that captivated the pan-European imagination, and the imagination of Restoration...