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

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Cambridge University Press, 19.04.2018
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.
 

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Inhalt

Chapter 1 China between the Ancients and the Moderns
15
Chapter 2 Robinson Crusoe and the Great Wall of China
47
China in The Spectator
89
Chapter 4 Oliver Goldsmiths Serial Chinaman
125
Chapter 5 Thomas Percys Chinese Miscellanies and the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
164
Notes
200
Bibliography
249
Index
272
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Autoren-Profil (2018)

Eun Kyung Min is Professor of English at Seoul National University in Seoul, Korea. Her published work appears in such journals as The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, Social Text, and English Literary History.

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