China from the Ruins of Athens and Rome

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Murray
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Thomas De Quincey ◽  
Middle Kingdom ◽  
Imperial Rome ◽  
Knowledge Formation ◽  
Joanna Baillie ◽  
Victorian Age

Fascinated and often baffled by China, Anglophone writers turned to classics for answers. In poetry, essays, and travel narratives, ancient Greece and Rome lent interpretative paradigms and narrative shape to Britain’s information on the Middle Kingdom. While memoirists of the diplomatic missions in 1793 and 1816 used classical ideas to introduce Chinese concepts, Roman history held ominous precedents for Sino–British relations according to Edward Gibbon and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. John Keats illuminated how peculiar such contemporary processes of Orientalist knowledge-formation were. In Britain, popular opinion on Chinese culture wavered during the nineteenth century, as Charles Lamb and Joanna Baillie demonstrated in ekphrastic responses to chinoiserie. A former reverence for China yielded gradually to hostility, and the classical inheritance informed a national identity-crisis over whether Britain’s treatment of China was civilized or barbaric. Amidst this uncertainty, the melancholy conclusion to Virgil’s Aeneid became the master-text for the controversy over British conduct at the Summer Palace in 1860. Yet if Rome was to be the model for the British Empire, Tennyson, Sara Coleridge, and Thomas de Quincey found closer analogues for the Opium Wars in Greek tragedy and Homeric epic. Meanwhile, Sinology advanced considerably during the Victorian age, with translations of Laozi and Zhuangzi placed in dialogue with the classical tradition. Classics changed too, with not only canonical figures invoked in discussions of China, but current interests such as Philostratus and Porphyry. Britain broadened its horizons by interrogating the cultural past anew as it turned to Asia: Anglophone readers were cosmopolitans in time as well as space, aggregating knowledge of Periclean Athens, imperial Rome, and many other polities in their encounters with Qing Dynasty China.

Opium and the Romantics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Morrison
Keyword(s):  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Medical Community ◽  
Thomas De Quincey ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Minor Ailments

Opium was an unremarkable part of daily life in Romantic Britain. It was highly prized by the medical community as a painkiller, and people of every age and class actively and unselfconsciously used it to treat a wide range of major and minor ailments. The Romantic age, however, also marks the crucial moment when British opium-eaters began to celebrate the drug, not for its medicinal powers, but for its recreational properties, as seen especially in the works of John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas De Quincey.

Madness Writing Poetry/ Poetry Writing Madness

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
John Keats ◽  
William Blake ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
The Public ◽  
John Clare ◽  
Romantic Poetry

The final chapter returns to the scene of Romantic poetry, looking at poetry by William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Clare. It reads these Romantic texts as poised articulations of the idea of poetic madness, and discusses generally how these writers contributed to, or interwove with their own lives and works, new and rediscovered mythologies of madness, sometimes anticipating or resisting the public images created by journalism, criticism, or biography, previously described. Finally, the Romantic mad poet is considered in relation to criticism and the canonical role of Romanticism in English literature.

scholarly journals „CHIŃSKI NORWID” A MYŚL I POETYKA NORWIDOLOGII POLSKIEJ.

2014 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 69
Author(s):  
Ewangelina Skalińska
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Middle Kingdom ◽  
Main Research ◽  
Research Questions

„Chinese Norwid” and the thought and poetics of Polish Norwid studies Review of Krzysztof Andrzej Jeżewski, Cyprian Norwid a myśl i poetyka Kraju Środka [Cyprian Norwid and the thought and poetics of the Middle Kingdom]. The review discusses main research questions tackled by Krzysztof Andrzej Jeżewski, the author of a comparative essay that juxtaposes selected aspects of Chinese culture and aesthetics with Cyprian Norwid’s works.

CIVILIZED DEPRAVITY: EVANGELICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF EARLY-NINETEENTH-CENTURY CHINA AND THE REDEFINITION OF “TRUE CIVILIZATION”

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 409-429
Author(s):  
Benjamin Fischer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Middle Kingdom ◽  
Select Committee ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Debate ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Ancient Civilizations ◽  
Bureaucratic State

In the first few decadesof the nineteenth century, the experience of missionaries among peoples as diverse as the ancient civilizations of India, the highly organized Zulu kingdoms, and the cannibal tribes of the South Seas had sparked a national debate concerning whether or not the “civilization of the heathen” was necessary before they could be converted, or whether Christianity would be the best means of civilizing them. Unresolved as far as public policy was concerned, this question entered discussions of the 1835 Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes (British Settlements), a committee convened to address problems arising between British settlers and indigenous communities, including important trade sites in Australia, New Zealand, and the islands of the Pacific. As with several other areas where significant British imperial pressure never took the form of direct colonial rule, the trade ports in China fell outside the committee's explicit considerations. Along with forbidding foreign settlements, Chinese culture did not fit the terms or assumptions of the committee's conversation. Since the first Jesuit mission to China in the late sixteenth century, there had been little doubt in Europe that Chinese civilization was far advanced. As a tightly controlled bureaucratic state confident of its own position as the Middle Kingdom of the world, China simply did not work within the discourse of civilization. This essay explores one attempt to adjust the terms of that British discourse in order to accommodate a civilized China.

scholarly journals ‘Two faces, each of a confused countenance’: Coleridge, De Quincey, and Contests of Authority

Romanticism ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 322-334
Author(s):  
Robert Morrison
Keyword(s):  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Thomas De Quincey ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Key Features

Thomas De Quincey exploits his rivalry with Samuel Taylor Coleridge to structure many of the key features of his most famous work, ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’ (1821). De Quincey's idolization of Coleridge began early and survived the anger and disappointment he felt after the collapse of their friendship and his discovery of Coleridge's intellectual duplicity. In ‘Confessions’, De Quincey's accounts of himself as a scholar of Greek literature, Ricardian economics, and Kantean philosophy are all galvanized by his knowledge that Coleridge too has worked in these areas. As opium addicts, De Quincey's experience of the drug overlaps with Coleridge's in a number of ways, while De Quincey differs from Coleridge – at least on the surface – in his claims about both the moral implications of drugged euphoria and the resolve needed to defeat addiction.

scholarly journals Discursive Constructions of the Self in British Romanticism

2008 ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Christoph Bode
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
John Keats ◽  
William Blake ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
Robert Frost ◽  
British Romanticism ◽  
Charlotte Smith ◽  
Discursive Constructions

Abstract This essay examines how subjective identities are discursively constructed in William Blake and P.B. Shelley, making brief references to William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, John Keats, and Charlotte Smith. It is argued that, although the poets come up with strikingly divergent solutions to the challenge of self-modelling, they face the same fundamental problems of self-grounding, working as they do within the paradox-prone paradigm of a Romantic self that tries to constitute itself out of itself. Comparing these Romantic poets with twentieth-century poetic models of selfhood and identity in Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, this essay provides a tentative answer to the question of whether we continue to operate within the Romantic framework of discursive self-construction or whether in fact we have moved beyond this mode of self-construction.

The Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Zimmerman
Keyword(s):  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Literary Education ◽  
William Hazlitt ◽  
Physical Gestures ◽  
Thomas Campbell

Public lectures on poetry caught the popular imagination in Britain in the first two decades of the nineteenth century with the performances of John Thelwall, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Campbell, and William Hazlitt. Lecturers aimed to shape auditors’ reading habits, burnish their critical profiles, and establish a literary canon, but auditors also wielded considerable influence, since their sustained approbation was necessary to a series’ success. A number of oral traditions fed the literary lecture’s development, but it emerged most vitally out of and against the radical speaking culture of the 1790s in which Thelwall and Coleridge had participated, and developed in anxious proximity to an expanding literary marketplace. These pressures informed lecturers’ critical arguments as they debated who should receive a literary education, what works they should read, and for what ends. As historical speaking performances, public lectures demand a methodological approach of their own, because lecturers communicated their arguments with words, physical gestures, facial expressions, and via self-presentation. An interdisciplinary scholarly consensus now recommends approaching these events by gathering as many surviving texts as possible from both parties and situating these performances in their specific times and places. Although women were disallowed from being public literary lecturers, female auditors performed significant cultural roles as patrons, and as hosts and guests at private gatherings that sometimes followed public lectures. Auditors including John Keats, Mary Russell Mitford, Lady Charlotte Bury, and Catherine Maria Fanshawe responded to lectures in conversation, poems, letters, and journal entries that should be considered creative works in their own right.

Coleridge and The English Poetic Tradition

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher R. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
Thomas Gray ◽  
Form Alone

This article examines the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in relation to the English poetic tradition. It suggests that Coleridge advanced the tradition envisioned by Thomas Gray by departing from the kind of ode which his predecessor exalted. The article contends that while lyric form alone could not revivify Coleridge's spirits, it indisputably invigorated the English poetic tradition. Some of those influenced by Coleridge's works include John Keats.

Intertextual Dialogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth Lau
Keyword(s):  
Jane Austen ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Significant Degree ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
John Clare ◽  
William Hazlitt ◽  
Competing Demands ◽  
First Time ◽  
Intertextual Dialogue

Intertextual dialogue in the Romantic period is shaped by conflicting imperatives. Romantic writers lived in an age when the pressure to be original and natural coincided for the first time to a significant degree with the worship and canonization of previous British authors, especially such ‘geniuses’ as Shakespeare and Milton. Major figures from every genre of the period can be seen to negotiate the competing demands to acquire legitimacy by invoking other, recognized writers, and to express their own unique vision and style—both to fit into existing literary tradition and to stand out as unique. This chapter explores the complications of intertextual dialogue in five representative authors across a variety of genres: the essayist and critic William Hazlitt, the poet and writer of marginalia Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the novelist Jane Austen, and poets John Clare and John Keats.

Opium Dreams

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Partridge
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Thomas De Quincey ◽  
Altered States ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Important Relationship ◽  
Cultural Origins

This chapter discusses the significance of opium during the early nineteenth-century and its relationship to Romanticism. While the chapter is organized around the influential work of Thomas De Quincey, particularly his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, it also discusses the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It discusses Romantic theories about the significance of dreams and their relationship to the understanding of induced altered states. Also, because the Romantics were interested in the geographical and cultural origins of opium, there is some discussion of the important relationship between drugs and Orientalism.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document