{"id":282,"date":"2014-04-14T11:55:30","date_gmt":"2014-04-14T11:55:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=282"},"modified":"2014-04-14T11:55:30","modified_gmt":"2014-04-14T11:55:30","slug":"five-questions-peter-kitson-on-forging-romantic-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=282","title":{"rendered":"Five Questions: Peter Kitson on Forging Romantic China"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Peter<\/a><\/p>\n

Peter J. Kitson is currently Professor of English at the University of East Anglia<\/a>; previous to this, he taught at the University of Dundee and the University of Wales, Bangor.\u00a0 His early research was on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but in recent years he has focused particularly on Romantic-period encounters between Britain and the wider world, publishing monographs on Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Period<\/em><\/a> (with Tim Fulford and Debbie Lee; Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Romantic Literature, Race and Colonial Encounter, 1760-1840<\/em><\/a> (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).\u00a0 He is an honorary member of BARS, having served for many years on the Executive, most recently as President between 2007 and 2011.\u00a0 His latest monograph, which we discuss below, is Forging Romantic China: Sino-British Cultural Encounters, 1760-1840<\/em><\/a>, published last year by Cambridge University Press.\u00a0 He will be giving a plenary address on his work in this area at the Romantic Connections<\/a> conference in Toyko this June.<\/p>\n

1) How did you first become interested in the relationship between China and the West?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I have always been fascinated by the historical and global contexts of the writing of the Romantic period and earlier and later periods, and my specific interest in China grew out of that more general concern. \u00a0I suppose the key moment occurred when I collaborated with Tim Fulford in producing an eight volume edition of travel writings from the period<\/a>, which was published by Pickering & Chatto in 2000-2001. \u00a0As part of the division of labour for that series, I edited the materials on China and Japan, along with Oceania, and the Arctic and Antarctic. \u00a0In particular, the accounts of the first embassy to China, that of Viscount Macartney in 1792-94, engrossed me, and I wanted to find out more about what Britons actually understood about China in the period. \u00a0I was quite struck by the fact that while there existed a substantial amount of writing about China and the west in earlier and later periods, there was comparatively little cultural criticism in the period c. 1780-1840 and it seemed, I thought, rather hubristically, that this would make a manageable project. \u00a0I was also intrigued by the comparative absence of China-centred discussions in contemporary orientalist discourse which has generally focused on India and the \u2018Near East\u2019 for obvious reasons. \u00a0So I wondered what difference would it make when we restore China to the Romantic period, or, to put in in other words, when we sinicize Romantic period writing. \u00a0When I researched my earlier book Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter<\/em>, I felt that I should problematize current accounts of race thinking by including chapters on understandings of China and \u2018Tartary\u2019 and their peoples in terms of racial discourse. \u00a0Once that project was completed, I was free to work on China.<\/p>\n

2) What new fields of knowledge did you need to familiarise yourself with in order to write this book?<\/strong><\/p>\n

As so often with these projects, we begin with the confidence of ignorance, which is a wonderfully enabling commodity, the capital of which, sadly, becomes quickly depleted. \u00a0Fortunately, I was awarded a major Leverhulme fellowship for two years, without which I would never have completed the book as it stands. \u00a0I needed to familiarise myself with Chinese history, as well as the historiographical debates about it, especially the move from the 1980s to produce a China centred focus. \u00a0The book has chapters on visual art and Romantic period drama, so I needed to work on those areas as well. \u00a0I had not worked extensively on drama, so I had to research the primary materials, involving a month in the Huntington Library<\/a> reading scripts in the Larpent collection. \u00a0I had to have a good sense of the leading aspects of chinoiserie in the period: architecture, design, porcelain etc, so needed to work on this as well as the various trades in these commodities. \u00a0I had to find out a lot about tea and the tea trade. \u00a0The book also contains discussions of the translations of Chinese texts, so I had to get up to speed on contemporary and period theories of translation, as well as achieve a good sense of the development of Chinese literature. \u00a0A major subject in the book is the British debates about Confucianism. \u00a0As well as reading the primary texts of the Confucian canon, I also had to get a grasp of the complex ways in which that canon was constructed and formed, and the debates between the different schools. \u00a0It was all fascinating reading. \u00a0Not quite as fascinating, but equally important, was gaining an understanding of the contributions and contexts of the British Protestant missionaries in China from 1806 onward – Robert Morrison, William Milne, W.H. Medhurst and so on – and their amazing life stories. \u00a0So I had lots of archival work to do on their accounts and correspondence. \u00a0Obviously, I had help from very generous Chinese scholars on matters relating to the language itself, but negotiating and referencing the various transliteration systems (Wade-Giles, Pinyin) and their implications was also a real challenge. \u00a0I hope I got it right!<\/p>\n

3) Forging Romantic China<\/em> makes clear that viewing Britain as ‘a modern, technological, and industrial power’ encountering in the Qing empire ‘an older and now stagnating polity’ is inaccurate, stressing instead ‘the complexities and multipolarity of exchange between Britain and China in an already globalized world’. What implications does your recovery of the extent of Chinese economic and cultural influence in the period have for our conventional narratives regarding imperial expansion and the development of British Romanticisms?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There has been a great deal of work on the concept of world systems in historical terms. \u00a0Most famously, Andre Gunder Frank posited the notion of a developed global economy led by China and India until c. 1800 and interrupted by northern European, then North American, industrial and technological hegemony in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. \u00a0Many other studies of Chinese history, science, and culture have made similar points. \u00a0For Britons in particular, the crucial importance of the tea trade with China, managed by the English East India Company, made China a subject of major importance to many people. \u00a0William and Dorothy Wordsworth\u2019s brother John was engaged in the tea trade and visited China twice. \u00a0Coleridge, apparently, considered Canton as a place where he might recuperate his health in 1804, before settling upon Malta. \u00a0How would the course of British Romanticism have changed had he gone there? \u00a0Jane Austen\u2019s \u2018sailor brother\u2019 Frank also spent time in Canton. \u00a0Lamb, and Peacock served in the offices of the East India Company in London. \u00a0These are just a few examples of the many personal and family connections that the tea trade established. \u00a0As such, it seems to me, China was a crucial topos in the minds of Britons. \u00a0More and more, as I researched, I met China everywhere, but often in fugitive and unexpected references and places, for instance in the middle of Book 8 of the Prelude<\/em><\/a>. \u00a0So I think we do need to look at Romantic period writing afresh and account for the ways in which China features as a significant, if not always obvious, presence. \u00a0We have tended to rely, too often, on De Quincey\u2019s vehemently racist writings about China and the \u2018Far East\u2019 as if they were numinously metonymic for Romantic attitudes to China, but casting the net more widely to include, drama, translations, diplomatic accounts etc, we find a much more nuanced, conflicted, and complicated view of China emerging. \u00a0My researches thus led me to argue that China featured as an important \u2018other\u2019 for Britons in the period in more profound ways than we have previously thought, acting almost as a kind of reflection of the emerging British imperial polity. \u00a0In the earlier part of the period, the British were very much in awe of China and were negotiating from what they perceived as a position of cultural weakness, arguing for reciprocity. \u00a0In fact, my research led me to believe that it was difficult to apply conventional notions of post-colonial othering to China given the power and prestige of the empire up until the 1830s. \u00a0It is very clear that there were many important collaborations and negotiations with China\u00a0in the period that belie any sense of a simple relation of colonial centre and periphery. \u00a0Much of the key knowledge about China emerges not from London, but from Bengal, Serampore, and Canton. \u00a0I also think we need to engage more fully with notions of civility, hospitality, and exchange in our understandings of encounters with other peoples.<\/p>\n

4) Which works from among the corpus of Romantic Sinology you discuss and the productions informed by this corpus do you believe deserve a wider contemporary readership? Are there particular works that you think could be usefully taught on undergraduate or postgraduate programmes?<\/strong><\/p>\n

First, I think we do have to be prepared to look at the works we already teach afresh, especially texts such as Coleridge\u2019s \u2018Kubla Khan\u2019, Wordsworth\u2019s Prelude<\/em>, and Austen\u2019s Mansfield Park<\/em>, to look for how representations of China are mediated. \u00a0We have to be prepared to supplement our canonical readings of De Quincey with other texts from the period that present a different view of China; the many translations, for instance, of Chinese drama, fiction, and poetry. \u00a0Certainly, I think dramas such as Arthur Murphy\u2019s The Orphan of China<\/em> (1759) and Andrew Cherry\u2019s The Travellers; or, Music\u2019s Fascination<\/em> (1806) are important texts that deserve study. \u00a0Murphy\u2019s drama is a version of a frequently adapted thirteenth-century Chinese drama, Zhao shi guer<\/em>, which Voltaire also had a go at. \u00a0It\u2019s a strong, well-written drama, performed throughout the period and well worth analysis. \u00a0The hook of the drama is that the leading figure, the mandarin Zamti, must either sacrifice the life of the heir to the dynasty he is loyal to, or that of his own son. \u00a0Oliver Goldsmith\u2019s The Citizen of the World<\/em> (1760) is rightfully receiving more and more of the attention it deserves as an important text about China and Britain. \u00a0I am also a strong advocate for Charles Lamb\u2019s essays \u2018Old China\u2019 and \u2018Dissertation on Roast Pig\u2019 (as for Lamb more widely) which are important in their views of China; when I taught them to undergraduates, they went down very well, like the newly-discovered roast pork. \u00a0Leigh Hunt\u2019s \u2018The Subject of Breakfast\u2014Tea Drinking\u2019 is also pedagogically very palatable. \u00a0Generally, when we look at Romantic period attitudes to nature we really should be referencing the crucial debate about the Anglo-Chinese garden, recently re-invigorated by William Chambers and Horace Walpole, as an informing context for the picturesque and the sublime. \u00a0The accounts of the Macartney and Amherst embassies and some of the travel accounts of the missionaries also work well in period courses about travel writing.<\/p>\n

5) What are you planning to do next?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am working on a sequel to Forging Romantic China<\/em> at the moment. \u00a0That book finishes in the late 1830s with the first Opium War looming and I would like to write something about the Opium trade and the war itself. \u00a0There has been a lot of scholarship on the accounts of the Second Opium war of the 1859-60 and the sacking of the Summer Palace, but those of the first have largely escaped discussion except as source material for the standard histories. \u00a0I was wondering about the ways in which this might be connected with contemporary discourses of opium: medical, aesthetic, and commercial. \u00a0I also have a project titled\u00a0Romanticism\u2019s Other Asia<\/em> in mind that would encompass period reflections on Japan, Mongolia, and Tibet. \u00a0I am busy with Will Christie at Sydney and others in setting up a research network about China and nineteenth-century writing more widely, involving Chinese scholars. \u00a0I am currently guest-editing a special number of the European Romantic Review<\/em> on this subject with contributions from distinguished scholars, about which I am very excited.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter J. Kitson is currently Professor of English at the University of East Anglia; previous to this, he taught at the University of Dundee and the University of Wales, Bangor.\u00a0… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=282"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":292,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282\/revisions\/292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}