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The English Renaissance and the Far East

Cross-Cultural Encounters

Adele Lee

The English Renaissance and the Far East: Cross-Cultural Encounters is an original and timely examination of cultural encounters between Britain, China, and Japan. It challenges accepted, Anglocentric models of East-West relations and offers a radical reconceptualization of the English Renaissance, suggesting it was not so different from current developments in an increasingly Sinocentric world, and that as China, in particular, returns to a global center-stage that it last occupied pre-1800, a curious and overlooked synergy exists between the early modern and the present.

Prompted by the current eastward tilt in global power, in particular towards China, Adele Lee examines cultural interactions between Britain and the Far East in both the early modern and postmodern periods. She explores how key encounters with and representations of the Far East are described in early modern writing, and demonstrates how work of that period, particularly Shakespeare, has a special power today to facilitate encounters between Britain and East Asia.

Readers will find the past illuminating the present and vice versa in a book that has at its heart resonances between Renaissance and present-day cultural exchanges, and which takes a cyclical, “long-view” of history to offer a new, innovative approach to a subject of contemporary importance.

University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Pages: 224 • Trim: 6¼ x 9½

978-1-61147-515-9 • Hardback • October 2017 • $117.00 • (£90.00)

978-1-68393-124-9 • Paperback • September 2019 • $50.99 • (£39.00)

978-1-61147-516-6 • eBook • October 2017 • $48.00 • (£37.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Shakespeare, History / Europe / Renaissance, Literary Criticism / Asian / Chinese, Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

The English Renaissance and the Far East

Cross-Cultural Encounters

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

The English Renaissance and the Far East: Cross-Cultural Encounters is an original and timely examination of cultural encounters between Britain, China, and Japan. It challenges accepted, Anglocentric models of East-West relations and offers a radical reconceptualization of the English Renaissance, suggesting it was not so different from current developments in an increasingly Sinocentric world, and that as China, in particular, returns to a global center-stage that it last occupied pre-1800, a curious and overlooked synergy exists between the early modern and the present.

Prompted by the current eastward tilt in global power, in particular towards China, Adele Lee examines cultural interactions between Britain and the Far East in both the early modern and postmodern periods. She explores how key encounters with and representations of the Far East are described in early modern writing, and demonstrates how work of that period, particularly Shakespeare, has a special power today to facilitate encounters between Britain and East Asia.

Readers will find the past illuminating the present and vice versa in a book that has at its heart resonances between Renaissance and present-day cultural exchanges, and which takes a cyclical, “long-view” of history to offer a new, innovative approach to a subject of contemporary importance.

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Pages: 224 • Trim: 6¼ x 9½

978-1-61147-515-9 • Hardback • October 2017 • $117.00 • (£90.00)

978-1-68393-124-9 • Paperback • September 2019 • $50.99 • (£39.00)

978-1-61147-516-6 • eBook • October 2017 • $48.00 • (£37.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Shakespeare, History / Europe / Renaissance, Literary Criticism / Asian / Chinese, Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

Author

Adele Lee is assistant professor in Early Modern Literature at Emerson College.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
List of Figures
Introduction: “What’s Past is Prologue”
PART ONE: RENAISSANCE ENGLAND
Chapter One: Decrypting Dee’s Dreams: An Elizabethan Magus and the Search for Cathay
Chapter Two: “Dumb Shewes of (Dis)Curtesie”: England’s First Encounter with China
Chapter Three: “Naturalised Japanners”: “Samurai William” and the English in Hirado, 1613–1623
PART TWO: THE ASIAN RENAISSANCE
Chapter Four: (RE)MADE IN CHINA: Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century
Chapter Five: “Sheikusupia to Nippon”: Paradox, Parody and Pastiche
Afterword: The Rise of East Asia and the Future of Early Modern Studies
Bibliography
Index

Reviews

As impressively insightful and informative as it is deftly written and exceptionally well organized, "The English Renaissance and the Far East: Cross-Cultural Encounters" is an extraordinary work of original and seminal scholarship.
— Midwest Book Review

This book would be of interest to anyone who studies English Renaissance studies, East/West relationships, East Asian studies, and would also engage those interested in either early modern travel writing or Shakespearean performance history. . . . this study. . . stands as a well-researched and engagingly tenacious journey into a vexed but vital realm of cross-cultural inquiry.
— Renaissance Quarterly

Lee takes us a step beyond the recent antiquarian trends in the discipline, shorn of the politics or theory that have been consigned to the dustbin of critical history in favour of more conservative forms of scholarship. . . The English Renaissance and the Far East is a deft and very welcome step towards more politically-minded approaches to the areas — geographical and methodological — that can potentially be focused on in the discipline; it is a unique and hugely valuable study of the cultural relationship between Britain and the Far East, then and now.
— Early Modern Literary Studies

The English Renaissance and the Far East

Cross-Cultural Encounters

Adele Lee

The English Renaissance and the Far East

Cross-Cultural Encounters

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