| Studies of the nineteenth century's revolutions in visual perception have historically tied these developments to technological innovations---the camera, the stereoscope, the panorama---without acknowledging the profound cultural constructions of vision that shaped these advancements. Garden, Plate and Den works to describe these neglected cultural developments by examining a series of nineteenth-century readings of "China," a term which sometimes meant a geographical locale but always evoked a way of seeing and being seen. Reading poetic image and novelistic description as well as landscape contour and teacup pattern, I locate the roots of a British visual and cultural modernity in the articulation of difference between Chinese and British systems of sight. For many Britons, this difference was simple: the Celestial Empire's walled gardens, forbidden cities, and paintings composed without linear perspective linked directly to a corresponding Chinese stagnancy, despotism, and repressed consciousness ("a people little-eyed and little-minded," as Leigh Hunt puts it). The cultural productions of the British empire, meanwhile, were held to reflect the progressive, dynamic farsightedness befitting a global power. Yet even as the writers and artists I study insisted on defining China as both backward in time and isolated in space, unable to see or move beyond the boundaries of the Great Wall, "the look of China" could be found ever more commonly occupying the territory of British imaginations. Landscape gardens, blue and white porcelain, and opium dens, to cite the dissertation's three major examples, shaped the ways that novelists, poets, essayists and painters not only envisioned the Orient, but wrote and pictured the terms of their own lived experience. As I follow the entanglements and disavowals that accompany the spread of these pieces of China, I contend that the rhetoric of a modern British vision in literature and culture draws from the hallmarks of this condemned Chinese aesthetic. In so doing, I link the Romantic textual productions of John Barrow, William Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt and Charles Lamb with the Victorian fictions of Robert Fortune, George Meredith and Charles Dickens. |
