演讲题目：English Literature of the Early Qing Dynasty: The Imperatives of Historical Cosmopolitanism

演讲人：David Porter

Professor of English and Comparative Literature

at the University of Michigan

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One of the enduring legacies of the Opium Wars in the nineteenth century was an unshakeable confidence, in Britain, of the West's cultural and technological superiority over the Chinese. Since that time, it has been difficult for students of earlier periods of English cultural history to recognize the more complex and ambivalent responses provoked among English readers by the remarkable achievements of Chinese civilization in literature, ethics, politics, and the arts.

In this paper, I will be less concerned with tracing the symptoms of this anxiety than with recovering the possibility of understanding it.  One pronounced consequence of the insularity of the national literary disciplines has been a deep-rooted belief that certain key milestones in 18c English literature--the rise of the novel or sentimentalism, for example--are in some sense both exceptional and paradigmatic of modernity. Such a view, I will suggest, suggests a degree of instrumental amnesia with respect to potentially comparable phenomena in other cultures, a motivated neglect of the profoundly cosmopolitan nature of early modern global history.  By exploring several of the remarkable convergences in social and literary developments between China and England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, I hope to demonstrate the productiveness of imagining English writings of the early Qing dynasty within a cosmopolitan, global setting.

 

David Porter earned degrees in comparative literary studies from Cornell, Cambridge, and Stanford universities. He is currently Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, where he is also a Faculty Associate at the Center for Chinese Studies. He is the author of Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, 2001) and The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 2010), and the editor of Between Men and Feminism (Routledge, 1992) and Internet Culture (Routledge, 1997)  He is currently working on a book comparing the literary cultures of China and England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.