Imagining China and the Making of English Modernity: Chinese Taste in English Literature from 1660 to 1770

Abstract

This thesis argues that the representations of things Chinese in eighteenth-century English literature reveal China as a co‐constitutive partner in Britain’s emerging national identity. It recovers things Chinese as active agents that mediate, unsettle, and transform cross-cultural relationships, continually acquiring new meanings and identities in the intricate and reciprocal nature of knowledge transmission. By reading things Chinese as “things-in-motion” to recuperate their agency, this thesis traces their trajectories across collections, trade networks, diplomatic exchanges, and moral and aesthetic debates to show how eighteenth-century Sino‑British cultural exchange is an active, dialogic process constructed through the iterative movement of objects and texts. By examining the mobility, hybridity, and resonance of things Chinese across diverse genres, from periodicals and personal correspondence to travelogues, pseudo-oriental tales, garden manuals and poetry, where Chinese knowledge is imagined, contested, and repurposed, this thesis reveals how the ambivalent imaginaries of China negotiate the tension between cosmopolitanism and nationalism that shapes the English identity. Close readings of key case studies include the representations of Chinese porcelain and its female collecting practice in Joseph Addison’s Spectator 37 (1711), Sarah Scott’s A Description of Millennium Hall (1762), and Mary Delany’s china closets and shellwork; accounts of the Chinese ritual of gift exchange in travel narratives by John Bell, Richard Walter and Benjamin Robins, and Edward Page; Oliver Goldsmith’s cosmopolitan ideal voiced through a Confucian narrator in The Citizen of the World (1762); and the competing garden discourses of Sir William Chambers and William Mason, and the introduction of the moutan peony via Sir Joseph Banks. This thesis ultimately repositions Sino-British material and imaginative exchange at the very core of the making of Englishness.