China and the Writing of English Literary Modernity, 1690–1770

Argues that eighteenth-century literature defined itself as 'English' and 'modern' by engaging with debates about Chinese history and culture.

Eun Kyung Min (Author)

9781108421935, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 April 2018

288 pages, 4 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.9 x 1.9 cm, 0.55 kg

'… Min's work makes a significant contribution.' Jennifer L. Hargrave, Eighteenth-Century Fiction

This book explores how a modern English literary identity was forged by its notions of other traditions and histories, in particular those of China. The theorizing and writing of English literary modernity took place in the midst of the famous quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns. Eun Kyung Min argues that this quarrel was in part a debate about the value of Chinese culture and that a complex cultural awareness of China shaped the development of a 'national' literature in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England by pushing to new limits questions of comparative cultural value and identity. Writers including Defoe, Addison, Goldsmith, and Percy wrote China into genres such as the novel, the periodical paper, the pseudo-letter in the newspaper, and anthologized collections of 'antique' English poetry, inventing new formal strategies to engage in this wide-ranging debate about what defined modern English identity.

1. China between the ancients and the moderns
2. Robinson Crusoe and the Great Wall of China
3. The new, uncommon, or strange
4. Oliver Goldsmith's serial Chinaman
5. Thomas Percy's Chinese miscellanies and the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]