This book explores the creation of imperial identities in Britain and several of its colonies - South Africa, India, Australia, Wales - and the ways in which the Victorian press around the world shaped and reflected these identities. The concept of co-histories, borrowed from Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, helps explain how the press shaped the imperial and national identities of Britain and of the colonies into co-histories that were thoroughly intertwined and symbiotic. Exploring a variety of press media, this book argues that the press was a site of resistance and revision by colonized authors and publishers, as well as a force of colonial authority for the British government. editors, and publishers, who projected a view of the empire to their British, colonial, and colonized readers. Topics include The Journal of Indian Art and Industry produced by the British art schools in India, women's periodicals, Indian writers in the British press, The Imperial Gazetteer published in Scotland, the rise of telegraphic news agencies, the British press's images of China seen through exhibitions of its art, the Tory periodical Blackwood's Magazine, and the Imperial Press Conference of 1909. University.
In her extensively researched exploration of China in British children’s literature, Shih-Wen Chen provides a sustained critique of the reductive dichotomies that have limited insight into the cultural and educative role these fictions played in disseminating ideas and knowledge about China. Chen considers a range of different genres and types of publication-travelogue storybooks, historical novels, adventure stories, and periodicals-to demonstrate the diversity of images of China in the Victorian and Edwardian imagination. Turning a critical eye on popular and prolific writers such as Anne Bowman, William Dalton, Edwin Harcourt Burrage, Bessie Marchant, G.A. Henty, and Charles Gilson, Chen shows how Sino-British relations were influential in the representation of China in children’s literature, challenges the notion that nineteenth-century children’s literature simply parroted the dominant ideologies of the age, and offers insights into how attitudes towards children’s relationship with knowledge changed over the course of the century. Her book provides a fresh context for understanding how China was constructed in the period from 1851 to 1911 and sheds light on British cultural history and the history and uses of children’s literature.
This catalogue describes some 900 works published from 1550 to 1850 as well as an additional 300 items reprinted in collective works. It therefore covers the first great phase of Western involvement in China. The catalogue is classified into 22 subject areas: Chinese studies, geography, travels, history, historiography, international relations, economic affairs, international trade, society, philosophy, education, religion (including Christian missions), language, literature, arts, architecture, hand crafts, Hong Kong, and Chinese-inspired pastiches.-- From publisher's description.
Oriental Networks explores forms of interconnectedness between Western and Eastern hemispheres during the long eighteenth century, a period of improving transportation technology, expansion of intercultural contacts, and the emergence of a global economy. In eight case studies and a substantial introduction, the volume examines relationships between individuals and institutions, precursors to modern networks that engaged in forms of intercultural exchange. Addressing the exchange of cultural commodities (plants, animals, and artifacts), cultural practices and ideas, the roles of ambassadors and interlopers, and the literary and artistic representation of networks, networkers, and networking, contributors discuss the effects on people previously separated by vast geographical and cultural distance. Rather than idealizing networks as inherently superior to other forms of organization, Oriental Networks also considers Enlightenment expressions of resistance to networking that inform modern skepticism toward the concept of the global network and its politics. In doing so the volume contributes to the increasingly global understanding of culture and communication. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.