RAS Lecture: PROFESSOR DAVID PORTER - The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England

Eighteenth-century consumers in Britain, living in an increasingly globalized world, were infatuated with exotic Chinese and Chinese-styled goods, art and decorative objects. However, they were also often troubled by the alien aesthetic sensibility these goods embodied. This ambivalence figures centrally in the period’s experience of China and of contact with foreign countries and cultures more generally. In the recent book from which this talk is adapted, David Porter analyzes the processes by which Chinese aesthetic ideas were assimilated within English culture. Through case studies of individual figures, including William Hogarth and Horace Walpole and broader reflections on cross-cultural interaction, he develops new interpretations of eighteenth-century ideas of luxury, consumption, gender, taste and aesthetic nationalism. 

David Porter teaches at the University of Michigan, where he is Professor of English and Comparative Literature as well as Faculty Associate at the Center for Chinese Studies.  A graduate of Cornell, Cambridge, and Stanford Universities, he is the author of two books exploring English and European responses to Chinese culture in the 17th and 18th centuries.  The first, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe, was published by Stanford in 2001.  The second, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth Century England, came out with Cambridge in 2010.  He is currently working on a new book comparing the literary cultures of China and England during the 17th and 18th centuries.

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