The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England

by David Porter

• ISBN13: 9780521192996
• ISBN10: 0521192994
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-12-13
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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. In this 2010 book, 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 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.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	p. vi
Acknowledgments	p. viii
Introduction: monstrous beauty	p. 1
China and the Aesthetics of Exoticism	p. 15
Eighteenth-century fashion and the aesthetics of the Chinese taste	p. 17
Cross-cultural aesthetics in William Chambers' Chinese garden	p. 37
What Do Women Want?	p. 55
Gendered Utopias in transcultural context	p. 57
William Hogarth and the gendering of Chinese exoticism	p. 78
Of Rocks, Gardens, and Goldfish	p. 93
The socio-aesthetics of the Chinese scholar's stone	p. 95
Horace Walpole and the Gothic repudiation of chinoiserie	p. 115
China and the Invention of Englishness	p. 131
Chinaware and the evolution of a modern domestic ideal	p. 133
Thomas Percy's sinology and the origins of English romanticism	p. 154
Notes	p. 184
Bibliography	p. 207
Index	p. 221
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