Empire in a glass case: Japanese beauty, British culture, and transnational aestheticism

The late nineteenth-century "Japan craze" which shaped British aestheticism has been characterized by both skeptical Victorians and twenty-first century critics as merely an ignorant infatuation that, as G. K. Chesterton said of The Mikado, had nothing to do with Japan. This paradoxical distinction is itself a symptom of as-yet-unresolved problems concerning the transnational circulation of art, aesthetics, and the cross-cultural transgressions of modernity – problems whose fountainhead is, I argue, to be found amidst Victorian literature's engagements with the world beyond its borders. "Empire in a Glass Case" takes the Victorian experience of Japanese aesthetics as a highly ambivalent response to a non-European modernity, in a period when Japan was militarizing, modernizing, and extending imperial control throughout Asia. Figures such as Oscar Wilde and W. E. Henley, whose enthusiastic embrace of ukiyo-e and lacquered design have been taken to be central to the craze, in fact registered serious doubts concerning the unique power of foreign forms to undermine Western cultural traditions. Others such as A. C. Swinburne, Walter Crane, and William Morris went further, taking the rise of Japanese culture to herald what Swinburne called "the annihilation of everything else" – the threat of a monoculturalism whose central locus was beyond the long reach of the British Empire. Meanwhile, Japanese critics living in the West – such as Yone Noguchi, Okakura Kakuzo, and Okakura Yoshisaburo – wrote literary criticism in English which attacked the Eurocentrism of British aestheticism while adapting Victorian literary problematics to reflect the most pressing issues of Japanese modernization. Building on recent scholarship in transnational Victorian studies, "Empire in a Glass Case" puts at the center of the Victorian global imaginary a truly difficult case: a nation that was never colonized, or the object of British colonial design; an empire whose military ambitions were not registered in the West as a fear of rebellion but as the usable, if volatile, violence of a strategic ally; an ethnicity whose aesthetic superiority to Western culture was widely assumed, not merely at the level of innate creativity but as a creative subjectivity capable of marshalling energy into form. In chapters that work across literary genres, geographical spaces, and traditional periods, my dissertation explores the debts of British aestheticism to an imperial world system, as well as the sophisticated, critical responses to increasing global integration which aestheticism nevertheless produced.