China in eighteenth-century English literature: an ornament to the enlightenment

Thesis

This thesis explores the engagement of eighteenth-century English writers with China and Chinese-related motifs in literary texts. The authors who wrote these works drew their references from the more ‘rational’ accounts such as those bearing the title of ‘histories,’ ‘letters,’ and ‘descriptions,’ which disseminated newly-acquired knowledge about the Orient – specifically about China – at that time. In particular, I chart a trajectory beginning with Jean-Baptiste Du Halde’s Description de la Chine (1735) and its English translations, through Eliza Haywood’s The Adventures of Eovaai (1736), Thomas Percy’s Hau Kiou Choaan (1761), Oliver Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World (1762), and culminating in D’Alenzon’s The Bonze (1769), William Chambers’s A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772), and Horace Walpole’s ‘Mi Li’ in Hieroglyphic Tales (1785). Incorporating information gained from Du Halde’s Description, Haywood and Percy examine the discourse of verisimilitude and the framing of factuality and reality in their works, while Goldsmith mediates moral knowledge concerning English society through a Chinese vehicle. A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, The Bonze, and ‘Mi Li,’ on the other hand, illustrate a broader Enlightenment tendency toward the fusion of knowledge domains through their relation to and reliance on the Anglo-Chinese gardening aesthetic. As such, translations, treatises, as well as oriental and pseudo-oriental tales and fictions concerning China are shown to be integral not only to conveying knowledge but also to providing discursive spaces for debating questions of knowledge-making in literature, even when they assume forms characterised with a lesser degree of ‘realism’ and a greater emphasis on what is ‘fabulous’ and ‘exotic.’ By focusing on English engagement with and knowledge about China instead of on how the English experienced China in material terms, or on the English ‘imagination’ of China, I attempt to establish a more substantive account of Chinese presence in eighteenth-century English literature. China or Chineseness is not a mere construction by or thinking tool of the English, but is shown to be an actual cultural entity that could be and is ‘known,’ a body of knowledge that is enlightened and enlightens. Overall, literary texts about China and with Chinese references in this thesis are clear illustrations of how knowledge and discussions of knowledge-making are enacted and ornamentalised in the form of literature in an integrated Enlightenment enterprise.

Authors: Wu, X

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-ozq4p5nom
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: China in eighteenth-century English literature; the Anglo-Chinese gardens; Orientalism and the Enlightenment; early sinology in England; oriental fictions and the English domestic novel
• Subjects: Gardens, English--Chinese influences; Oriental fiction (English); Historical criticism (Literature)