Books > History > World history > 1750 to 1900
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China from the Ruins of Athens and Rome - Classics, Sinology, and Romanticism, 1793-1938 (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,141
Discovery Miles 21 410
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China from the Ruins of Athens and Rome - Classics, Sinology, and Romanticism, 1793-1938 (Hardcover)
Series: Classical Presences
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Fascinated and often baffled by China, Anglophone writers turned to
classics for answers. In poetry, essays, and travel narratives,
ancient Greece and Rome lent interpretative paradigms and narrative
shape to Britain's information on the Middle Kingdom. While
memoirists of the diplomatic missions in 1793 and 1816 used
classical ideas to introduce Chinese concepts, Roman history held
ominous precedents for Sino-British relations according to Edward
Gibbon and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. John Keats illuminated how
peculiar such contemporary processes of Orientalist
knowledge-formation were. In Britain, popular opinion on Chinese
culture wavered during the nineteenth century, as Charles Lamb and
Joanna Baillie demonstrated in ekphrastic responses to chinoiserie.
A former reverence for China yielded gradually to hostility, and
the classical inheritance informed a national identity-crisis over
whether Britain's treatment of China was civilized or barbaric.
Amidst this uncertainty, the melancholy conclusion to Virgil's
Aeneid became the master-text for discussion of British conduct at
the Summer Palace in 1860. Yet if Rome was to be the model for the
British Empire, Tennyson, Sara Coleridge, and Thomas de Quincey
found closer analogues for the Opium Wars in Greek tragedy and
Homeric epic. Meanwhile, Sinology advanced considerably during the
Victorian age. Britain broadened its horizons by interrogating the
cultural past anew as it turned to Asia; Anglophone readers were
cosmopolitans in time as well as space, aggregating knowledge of
Periclean Athens, imperial Rome, and many other polities in their
encounters with Qing Dynasty China.
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