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. By focusing on English engagement with and knowledge about China instead of on how English experienced China in material terms, or on English 'imagination' of China, I attempt to establish a more substantive account of Chinese presence in eighteenth-century English literature.

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