The Chinese taste in eighteenth-century England

Abstract

"Eighteenth-century consumers in Britain, living in an increasingly globalised 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 analyses 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"--Provided by publisher.

Contents

Introduction: Monstrous beauty -- pt. 1. China and the aesthetics of exoticism -- Eighteenth-century fashion and the aesthetics of the Chinese taste -- Cross-cultural aesthetics in William Chambers' Chinese garden -- pt. 2. What do women want? -- Gendered utopias in transcultural context -- William Hogarth and the gendering of Chinese exoticism -- pt. 3. Of rocks, gardens, and goldfish -- The socio-aesthetics of the Chinese scholar's stone -- Horace Walpole and the Gothic repudiation of Chinoiserie -- pt. 4. China and the invention of Englishness -- Chinaware and the evolution of a modern domestic ideal -- Thomas Percy's sinology and the origins of English romanticism.