China and the Victorian Imagination Empires Entwined [Hardcover]

Ross G. Forman demonstrates how integral China and the Chinese were to the Victorian imagination and reassesses British imperialism in Asia.Studies of the literature of the British imperialism too often focus on India to the exclusion of other areas. This book redresses the balance by demonstrating how integral China and the Chinese were to the British imagination and to globalization, literature, aesthetics, and popular culture from the 1840s to 1911.Studies of the literature of the British imperialism too often focus on India to the exclusion of other areas. This book redresses the balance by demonstrating how integral China and the Chinese were to the British imagination and to globalization, literature, aesthetics, and popular culture from the 1840s to 1911.Today, the 'rise' of China is omnipresent: whether articulated as opportunity or threat, expected or surprising, China's global prominence is consistently proclaimed as new and noteworthy. Yet the Victorians held similar beliefs that China was rising in importance, and that its rise was integrally tied to the success of the West. This book traces the development of this perception of China and the Chinese from the Opium Wars to the 1911 demise of the Qing dynasty. It surveys an array of literary and cultural materials, from short stories produced by British expatriates in China and distributed locally to representations of the Chinese on the British stage, from the sensational fiction surrounding the Chinese community in London's East End to turn-of-the-century invasion novels with their 'Yellow Peril' villains. Ross Forman demonstrates that China, as much as India, occupied the Victorian imagination; in so doing, he reassesses British imperialism in Asia.Introduction: topsy-turvy Britain and China; 1. The manners and customs of the modern Chinese: narrating China through the treaty ports; 2. Projecting from Possession Point: James Dalziel's chronicles of Hong Kong; 3. Peking plots: representing the Boxer Reblz