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Previous articleNext article FreeFrom the EditorPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAt the 2020 MLA convention in Seattle, the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association considered the topic “British Romanticism and China,” arranged under the guidance of Peter Kitson. The Wordsworth Circle vol. 51, no. 2 (spring 2020) includes extended and revised versions of the papers presented by Kitson, Elizabeth Chang, Jennifer L. Hargrave, and Chris Murray, along with new essays by Bysshe Inigo Coffey and Deborah Kennedy, under the heading of “Romantic Asia: British Cultural Encounters with China and India, 1790–1830.” In setting forth the abiding critical as well as cultural significance of the topic, Peter Kitson writes: This issue of The Wordsworth Circle engages with recent work on British cultural representations of, and exchanges with, Qing China and its networks of trade and influence in India and beyond, extending our existing but still largely provisional understanding of this complex and emerging area of study in new and interesting directions. Although Orientalism as a discursive field has been extensively established in Romantic-period critical writing since the 1980s in the wake of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), studies of the cultural relationship between Britain and China have been relatively few. Said argued that Orientalism, as a discursive field, was elastic, reflecting the current imperatives of mainly British and French colonialism that were then focused on what was Eurocentrically termed the “Near East,” rather than the “Far East.” Combined with Christian European interest in the biblical lands, this led to an emphasis on particular geopolitical areas alongside an urgent interest in the histories, peoples, religions, and cultures of the Indian subcontinent, most notably in studies of the scholarship of Sir William Jones sponsored by the administration of Warren Hastings. Studies of Sino-British cultural relations have thus been relative latecomers to the Orientalist feast. The essays gathered here attempt to correct this oversight and move forward a larger critical agenda.With the increasing cultural, economic, and political presence of the People’s Republic of China on the global stage, it might now be argued that in the second decade of the twenty-first century our critical focus should be attuned more than ever to China and Southeast Asia. This critical imperative can be seen to have sharpened somewhat with the emergence this year of the global nightmare of Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV), which first presented itself in the Chinese province of Wuhan. As I write (April 3, 2020) in personal self-isolation in Scotland, there have been 53,069 confirmed deaths and over one million confirmed cases worldwide (figures collated by Johns Hopkins University). Nowhere has escaped its impact. We all know of people who have died or been taken ill. The study of the cultural representation of this global pandemic and the ways in which representation of it are currently being contested are now a matter for present and future scholarly inquiry, but it tragically has demonstrated, once again, the very real interconnectedness of the global economy and the interdependence of the western and eastern hemispheres. It is the contention of the scholars represented in this collection that such global networks and transfers are not at all new.The established great trade in China tea, managed by the East India Company until 1833, and the burgeoning trade in British-produced Bengal opium to China are surely evidence enough of this. This trade occasioned the spread in the 1820s and beyond of a new, highly virulent strain of cholera from India to Britain and the West. In July 1832, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote that he was “jealous of the Glory of this new-imported Nabob, from the Indian Jungles, his Serene Blueness, Prince of the Air—lest he should have the presumption—for there is no bounds to the arrogance of these Oriental Imports—to set himself up in Hell against Lords Grey, Durham & the Reform-Bill” (Collected Letters, ed. E. L. Griggs, Oxford University Press, 1956–71, 6.916). The resonance of this comment with contemporary events needs no amplification. The networks that the global trade in tea and other Eastern products created, and its impact on one major Romantic-period family history, are given detailed demonstration by Deborah Kennedy’s essay in this volume on the Wordsworth family’s Indian connections resulting from involvement in the East India Company’s activities. Such connections are simply everywhere in the period. The crucial political and cultural events, among others, that will define this developing scholarly inquiry will be the first two British royal embassies to China (Macartney, 1793, and Amherst, 1816, discussed by Peter Kitson and Elizabeth Chang), the end of the East India Company’s monopoly of the China trade in 1833, and the outbreak of hostilities leading to the first so-called Anglo-Chinese or Opium War of 1840–42, ushering in the period of China’s “century of humiliation” (쑰 bǎinián guóchǐ) from 1839 to 1949. This scholarly inquiry has established the period from 1790 to 1842 as one of the most important in the fashioning of contemporary relations with China.The essays in this issue further the case that Qing China was an important, though highly problematic, referent in the literature and culture in this crucial period, and that this ambiguous presence has not been sufficiently addressed. Many years ago, A. O. Lovejoy put forward the (then) very unusual thesis that one of the origins of “Romanticism” as an aesthetic was located in a Chinese source, the preference for a form of wildness and irregularity in the eighteenth-century British landscape garden (“The Chinese Origin of a Romanticism”; 1933). Other scholars of British literature and culture have addressed such issues, placing British cultural responses to China in the context of a dominant Sino-centric global economy, up until approximately 1800. Such criticism has also demonstrated the sustained allure that Chinese commodities—tea, silk, porcelain, furniture, lacquerware, as well as Chinese designs in gardening and interior decoration—held throughout the long eighteenth century. Yet this British desire for Chinese forms and products was always balanced by a strange ambivalence. The essays in this issue argue that the Chinese contribution to the culture of the British Romantic period (and to European Romanticism more widely) was substantial, and just as important as the later, more discussed, nineteenth-century influence of Chinese aesthetics on European Aestheticism and Modernism. The articles here by Jennifer L. Hargrave, Chris Murray, and Bysshe Inigo Coffey discuss crucial aspects of this larger intellectual and cultural exchange.In the period, new perceptions and understandings of China deriving from the numerous accounts of the first two British embassies to China (Macartney and Amherst) and of East India Company personnel, missionaries, naturalists, as well as the odd independent traveler (Thomas Manning), were quickly mediated via a dynamic print and visual culture to a diverse range of poets, novelists, essayists, dramatists, and reviewers, including Jane Austen, S. T. Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, the Wordsworths, Sydney Owenson, John Wilson Croker, John Barrow, and others, and subsequently informed British understandings and imaginings of China on the eve of the first Opium War of 1839–42. References to China are everywhere in the writing of the period but have been overlooked, in the main, by earlier critics. Similarly, new English-language translations appeared of Chinese literature, philosophy, and other subjects, which were reviewed, in the major periodicals (as discussed by Jennifer L. Hargrave). We thus see ourselves as cognate with this larger project to restore Qing China as both a cultural topos and a geographical place, as well as a major player in the immense global economic and cultural trade of Asia. Finally, we seek to restore these political, economic, and cultural networks of power and influence to their truly global presence in our understandings of the culture and literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.In this unexpectedly relevant issue of TWC, Kitson and his fellow contributors furthermore develop important considerations regarding the kind of cultural landscape their assertions present, as well as what difference they may make to our present understanding.The papers selected for the meeting of the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association at the 2021 MLA (Toronto) gathering, “Romanticism and Wilderness” (arranged by James McKusick), will be considered for publication in TWC vol. 52, no. 3 (summer 2021). We also solicit additional contributions examining the idea of wilderness in Romantic-era literature, culture, and scientific discourse from any geographical region, as well as essays examining the relevance of Romantic concepts of wilderness to contemporary concerns about the environment and climate change (deadline: January 15, 2021).— CWM Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 51, Number 2Spring 2020Romantic Asia: British Cultural Encounters with China and India, 1790–1830 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/709317 Views: 104 © 2020 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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