Global passions: Travel, space and cultural transformations in modern China, 1840s--1910s

This study examines the culture of travel in China from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, in the hope of exploring the essential logic behind the tremendous changes in the cultural production at the time. Focusing on the use of travel narrative in accounts on journey to Europe and North America, geographical writings on modern China and the New Fiction, it stakes out how an anxious structure of feeling over the loss of a historical totality, arising with the emergence of a global space in China, operated to mediate and regulate the cultural production and those discourses of civilization, nation and modernity competing to dominate it. This anxious structure of feeling is defined as "global passion."; Taking the global passion as an essential cultural logic, this study details the narrative strategy of naturalizing such industrial wonders as the steamship and railway train in the writings of the first groups of Chinese diplomats to Europe and North America in the late 1860s and early 1870s and the strategy of discursive excursion used by other Chinese resident diplomats and exiled reformists who journeyed to the West from the 1870s to 1910s in the hope of grasping the social and historical totality of the West and the whole world. It also analyzes the narrative strategy of containing local attachment used by writers of human geography at the time to produce a modern China, and explores how female travelers were used in fiction to fashion an emotional subject for the nation at the beginning of the twentieth century.