| This dissertation argues that throughout the long eighteenth century, the idea of China and the category of Chinese things were central to the process by which British culture reimagined itself as the culture of a nation more modern than and therefore at the center of a world of other nations. In order to fully understand the role of orientalism as it emerged as part of British imperialism, I argue, we must attend to its pre-history, in which Chinese things are a crucial component of what it means to be British. Over the course of the eighteenth century, Chinese things served as the emblem of a new category of material object in relation to which a whole range of British authors rethought and debated what relationship between subject and object was natural, desirable, and right. At the beginning of the century, when a British readership was beginning to imagine itself as a cosmopolitan nation, China demonstrated the power of British taste to turn pieces of foreign culture into expressive objects that could, through aesthetic arrangement, be made to constitute a new kind of British subject. By the century's end, China had been domesticated by the British novel and reincorporated into a new order of things. Through a process of disenchantment we now recognize as the mainstream novel, Chinese things continued to serve as the example par excellence of how a whole range of material objects might be imported, integrated, and transformed into a larger differential system known as the "home," a collection of objects that eventually distinguished the middle-class household that emerged in the nineteenth century. While the signification of Chinese objects thus shifted from the beginning to the end of the long eighteenth century, they consistently bore a positive relationship to British identity: in both cases, they are conceptually mastered by the British subject and objectify his or her way of life. |
