British Modernism and Chinoiserie

Format:

Book

Language:

English

Imprint:

Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, [2015]

Subject:

English literature - Chinese influences
English literature - 20th century - History and criticism
Chinoiserie (Art) - Great Britain
Art, British - Chinese influences
Modernism (Aesthetics) - Great Britain

Contributor:

Witchard, Anne Veronica, editor

ISBN:

9780748690954, 0748690956, 9780748690961, 0748690964, 9780748690978, and 0748690972

Description:

x, 235 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm

Bibliographic Note:

Includes bibliographical references and index

Contents:

Introduction: "the lucid atmosphere of fine Cathay" / Anne Witchard -- China and the formation of the modernist aesthetic ideal / David Porter -- Shared affinities : Katherine Mansfield, Ling Shuhua and Virginia Woolf / Patricia Laurence -- Roger Fry, Chinese art and The Burlington magazine / Ralph Parfect -- Chinese artistic influences on the vorticists in London / Michelle Ying-Ling Huang -- The idea of the Chinese garden and British aesthetic modernism / Elizabeth Chang -- "Beautiful, baleful absurdity" : chinoiserie and modernist ballet / Anne Witchard -- Fashion, chinoiserie and modernism / Sarah Cheang -- The Oriental and the music hall : sound and space in Thomas Burke's Limehouse Chinatown / Paul Kendall -- Staging China, excising the Chinese : Lady Precious Stream and the darker side of chinoiserie / Diana Yeh -- Chinoiserie : an unrequited architectural affair / Edward Denison

Summary:

This volume examines the ways in which an intellectual vogue for a mythic China was a constituent element of British modernism. Traditionally defined as a decorative style that conjured a fanciful and idealized notion of China, chinoiserie was revived in in London's avant-garde circles, the Bloomsbury group, the Vorticists and others, who like their eighteenth-century forebears, turned to China as a cultural and aesthetic utopia. As part of Modernism's challenge to the 'universality' of so-called Western values and aesthetics, the turn to China would contribute much more than has been acknowledged to Modernist thinking. As these 10 new chapters demonstrate, China as an intellectual and aesthetic utopia dazzled intellectuals and aesthetes, at the same time the consumption of Chinese exoticism became commercialized. The essays show that from cutting-edge Modernist chic to mass culture and consumer products, the vogue for chinoiserie style and motifs permeated the art and design of the period. --Provided by publisher

Collection:

BGC Monograph Stacks

Call Number:

NX650.E85 B75 2015

Available

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