Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century England, 1660–1760
Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century England, 1660–1760

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Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century England, 1660–1760

Book: Hardcover 01 - 11 - 2011

Product ID: 4422377

Condition: New
Publisher : Johns Hopkins University Press

ISBN-10 : 1421402165

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Product Description China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a model of economic and political strength, viewed by many as the greatest empire in the world. While the importance of China to eighteenth-century English consumer culture is well documented, less so is its influence on English values. Through a careful study of the literature, drama, philosophy, and material culture of the period, this book articulates how Chinese culture influenced English ideas about virtue. Discourses of virtue were significantly shaped by the intensified trade with the East Indies. Chi-ming Yang focuses on key forms of virtue―heroism, sincerity, piety, moderation, sensibility, and patriotism―whose meanings and social importance developed in the changing economic climate of the period. She highlights the ways in which English understandings of Eastern values transformed these morals. The book is organized by type of performance―theatrical, ethnographic, and literary―and by performances of gender, identity fraud, and religious conversion. In her analysis of these works, Yang brings to light surprising connections between figures as disparate as Confucius and a Chinese Amazon and between cultural norms as far removed as Hindu reincarnation and London coffeehouse culture. Part of a new wave of cross-disciplinary scholarship, where Chinese studies meets the British eighteenth century, this novel work will appeal to scholars in a number of fields, including performance studies, East Asian studies, British literature, cultural history, gender studies, and postcolonial studies. Review Well-organized and documented. ― Book Bargains and Previews Yang has shown a productive conceptual direction for new scholarship on English writers in this period to take. For raising. . . important and clearly relevant and persistent issues, she deserves a wide readership. -- Robert Batchelor ― Journal of British Studies A book of great substance and originality. The scholarship underlying Yang's work is of exceptionally high quality, demonstrating impressive mastery of a broad range of subject areas. Complementing the depth with which each topic is treated are the author's boldly imaginative gestures of integration and synthesis, by which she weaves together seemingly discrete elements of cultural discourse into richly patterned and freshly revealing forms. -- David L. Porter, author of The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England About the Author Chi-ming Yang is an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.

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