Orientalism Reconsidered: China and the Chinese in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Victorian Studies

Until very recently, critical attention to literary relations and aesthetic exchanges between Britain and China in the 19th century has been scant. However with the current shifting of focus in Victorian studies away from canonical, mainstream concerns toward the disenfranchised people and productions that inhabited the vibrant, often carnivalesque, world of popular culture, China has made its way – if not into the floodlights – at least into the well‐lit recesses of literary‐critical consciousness. This essay provides both an overview of China’s pervasive influence on British life and letters in the 19th century as well as an assessment of scholarship in the developing field of Sino‐British studies. Aside from surveying a number of approaches to this relatively new field of inquiry, I suggest that past critical neglect of 19th‐century, Sino‐British literary relations is, in one part, residual from the seemingly dismissive, at times sinophobic, and overwhelmingly negative attitudes of the Victorians toward China and, in another part, to China’s awkward situation within a dominant theoretical framework of Orientalism that largely fails to account for the cultural and historical nuances of its special relations with the West. In offering an overview both of China’s appearance in Victorian literature and of the developing field of Sino‐British studies, this essay aims not only to draw attention to a previously overlooked aspect of Victorian literature and culture but to suggest the vital revisions of critical perspective occasioned by its exploration.