The Idea of the Chinese Garden and British Aesthetic Modernism

Author(s):  
Elizabeth Chang

This chapter argues that a comparative lack of British interest in traditional Chinese gardens during the period 1880-1914, often interpreted as evidence of Japan’s more ready appeal, obscures the complexity of organic exchange going on between Britain and East Asia at this time. Celebrated plant hunters were launching daring expeditions into unexplored Western China; those plants, upon importation, were so successfully and quickly naturalized that they became evidence of the landscape conformity that Japanese designs were held to resist. What’s more, even as these plant hunters were publishing their travel narratives for a broad audience, select British readers were absorbing a very different view of Chinese gardens through the outré works of French and British writers. Spurred by the retranslation of Thomas De Quincey’s works into French, late nineteenth-century French decadents found inspiration in the same provocative elements of Chinese behavior and landscape that British Romantics had found a century before. Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden was read and appreciated by Oscar Wilde, among others, and formed a part of a larger fin-de-siècle European reconsideration of the East. It is the combination of the multiple forms of the Eastern garden that provide a new way of understanding aesthetic internationalism.

2006 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 21-35
Author(s):  
Hiroshi Mitani

In the contemporary world the word “Asia” invokes a sense of regional integration or solidarity among Asian peoples. This sense of the word is rather recent and can only be traced back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In that period, Japan called on Asian people to unify against the Western threat under its leadership. But until the late nineteenth century, “Asia” was a purely geographical term; merely the name of one of the five continents-a concept that had been modeled by early modern Europeans.In this essay I will discuss how and why the political usage of the word “Asia,” stressing Asian solidarity, was invented by the Japanese around the 1880s. I also investigate the ways in which this sense of the word spread to the rest of the geographical region of Asia. In order to understand the unfolding of this historical process, we should first examine the traditional concepts of world geography in Japan and how the European concept of Asia was introduced into East Asia.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 23-33
Author(s):  
Takeharu Ōkubo

In 1853 United States warships led by Commodore Matthew Perry (1794-1858) came to Japan to negotiate a commercial treaty. This event had suddenly thrust late-nineteenth-century Japan into a web of relations with the Western nations, and as a result, European international law was a topic of particularly urgent concern including some normative philosophical questions: What is Civilization? What are the rules in international relations? What are the differences with the existing order in East Asia?


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
MARTIN DUSINBERRE

ABSTRACT In the late nineteenth century, as Japanese scholars, traders, and labourers began to cross the Pacific Ocean in ever greater numbers, Tokyo-based intellectuals started to think about the significance of the ocean for the upcoming century. One prominent articulation of this ‘Pacific age’ was the result of an intellectual dialogue between a young Japanese student, Inagaki Manjirō (1861–1908), and his Cambridge professor, John Robert Seeley (1834–95). Traditionally framed as a relationship of ‘influence’ from teacher to pupil, and thus from West to East, the emergence of the ‘Pacific age’ was in fact the result of a sophisticated modulation of ideas from Seeley's The expansion of England (1883) into the rapidly changing politics of early 1890s Japan. This article traces that modulation in Inagaki's published works between 1890, when he graduated from Cambridge, and 1895, when Japan defeated China in the First Sino-Japanese War. It argues that Seeley's analyses, in Inagaki's hands, gave a significant impetus to existing expansionist visions in Japan, and thus constitute one example of late nineteenth-century history being written in the discursive space between Europe and East Asia.


2002 ◽  
pp. 106-110
Author(s):  
Liudmyla O. Fylypovych

Sociology of religion in the West is a field of knowledge with at least 100 years of history. As a science and as a discipline, the sociology of religion has been developing in most Western universities since the late nineteenth century, having established traditions, forming well-known schools, areas related to the names of famous scholars. The total number of researchers of religion abroad has never been counted, but there are more than a thousand different centers, universities, colleges where religion is taught and studied. If we assume that each of them has an average of 10 religious scholars, theologians, then the army of scholars of religion is amazing. Most of them are united in representative associations of researchers of religion, which have a clear sociological color. Among them are the most famous International Society for the Sociology of Religion (ISSR) and the Society for Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR).


2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Dewi Jones

John Lloyd Williams was an authority on the arctic-alpine flora of Snowdonia during the late nineteenth century when plant collecting was at its height, but unlike other botanists and plant collectors he did not fully pursue the fashionable trend of forming a complete herbarium. His diligent plant-hunting in a comparatively little explored part of Snowdonia led to his discovering a new site for the rare Killarney fern (Trichomanes speciosum), a feat which was considered a major achievement at the time. For most part of the nineteenth century plant distribution, classification and forming herbaria, had been paramount in the learning of botany in Britain resulting in little attention being made to other aspects of the subject. However, towards the end of the century many botanists turned their attention to studying plant physiology, a subject which had advanced significantly in German laboratories. Rivalry between botanists working on similar projects became inevitable in the race to be first in print as Lloyd Williams soon realized when undertaking his major study on the cytology of marine algae.


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