Xiaofan Wu

Thesis Title: China in Eighteenth-Century English Literature: An Ornament to the Enlightenment

Supervisor: Prof. Ros Ballaster

My thesis explores the engagement of eighteenth-century English writers with China and Chinese references in (pseudo-)translations, treatises, as well as (pseudo-)oriental tales and fictions. Scholars have sought to broaden the geographic scope of eighteenth-century studies, and in this context Anglo-Chinese encounters have been examined from a wide range of perspectives—chief among them commerce (porcelain and tea being two of the most familiar Chinese commodities in the age), but also literature. In practice, however, discussions often betray a persistent sense of irrelevance concerning the real China, as 'China' or 'Chineseness' is increasingly cast as an English imaginative construct—serving as a conceptual tool for political, economic, literary, aesthetic, and intellectual debates at home. My project is less concerned about what China or the idea of China meant for the eighteenth-century British but about why and how China came to occupy this unique place. 

Research Interests: the long eighteenth-century, novel, drama, aesthetics, oriental fiction, the history of the novel, travel literature, Orientalism, chinoiserie, landscape gardens; Horace Walpole, Thomas Percy, Oliver Goldsmith, William Chambers, Eliza Haywood, Pope, Johnson, Addison, Defoe.

Teaching: From Michaelmas 2022 to Hilary 2023 I worked with Dr Tom MacFaul at St Edmund Hall on the teaching of two period papers, literature in English 1550-1660 and literature in English 1660-1760.

Conference Papers:

'A Chinese Note on the Unity of Goldsmith's Art,' Anglo-East Asian Exchanges in Literature, Culture, and Media, Trier University, 29 June 2023

'The Chinese Matron and the Marriage Act of 1753,' BSECS Postgraduate and Early Career Researcher Conference, 13 July 2023