Romantic c/China: The Literature of Chinoiserie

Abstract

As the popularity of Chinese-style textiles, lacquers, and especially porcelain increased in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, chinoiserie objects inevitably found their way into literature. Porcelain, or ‘china’ begins to be troped as the reified sign of its geographical and cultural referent, ‘China’. In Romantic writings about porcelain, writers render porcelain as a legible object with a story to be told, or even make the object itself speak, so that c/China teapots and dishes seemed less and less like mass-produced things and more and more like auratic works of art that had the power of mediating relations between British consumers and Chinese producers. In the chinoiserie poems of Joanna Baillie and Thomas Hood, we can witness the literary development of a unique version of commodity fetishism that invests great cultural and historical significance in the imagined lives of objects.