Invention of China in early modern England : spelling the dragon / Jonathan E. Lux.
The Invention of China in Early Modern England describes how several different English communities became aware of China. It begins by describing how early modern intellectuals used the utopian ideal of China to license all kinds of progressive innovation before chronicling how Englands growing comm...
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| Format: | Ebook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Cham, Switzerland :
Palgrave Macmillan,
2021.
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| Series: | Early modern literature in history.
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Springer Humanities and Social Science eBook Collection 2021 English/International |
| Summary: | The Invention of China in Early Modern England describes how several different English communities became aware of China. It begins by describing how early modern intellectuals used the utopian ideal of China to license all kinds of progressive innovation before chronicling how Englands growing commerce in southeast Asia radically changed Chinas representation in the English discourse community. For the new community of English merchants proposing to trade in Chinese goods, China became the seminal example in the growing discourse community of English Orientalism. It was an absolute or arbitrary authoritarian state, associated with crooked business dealings, and cloaked in a rhetoric of secrecy and exclusiona dangerous exception to the traditions, values, and identities of the emergent English speaking states. Finally, the book points out some of the ways that contemporary English language sources continue to represent this early modern English thought tradition, labelling the complexities of modern China with analytical vocabulary perhaps better suited to the pressing political anxieties of the seventeenth century. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (v, 224 pages) : map. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 303084031X 9783030840310 3030840328 9783030840327 |