England's Asian Renaissance explores how Asian knowledges, narratives, and customs inflected early modern English literature. Just as Asian imports changed England's tastes and enriched the English language, Eastern themes, characters, and motifs helped shape the country's culture and contributed to its national identity. Questioning long-standing dichotomies between East and West and embracing a capacious understanding of translatio as geographic movement, linquistic transformation, and cultural grafting, the collection gives pride of place to convergence, approximation, and hybridity, thus underscoring the radical mobility of early modern culture. In so doing, England's Asian Renaissance also moves away from entrenched narratives of Western cultural sovereignty to think anew England's debts to Asia.
Published by the University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
England’s Asian Renaissance: An Introduction
Su Fang Ng and Carmen Nocentelli
Part 1 The Eurasian Continuum
1 The Ottomans in and of Europe
Abdulhamit Arvas
2 Robert Sherley and the Persian Habit
Nedda Mehdizadeh
3 The East India Spice Trade and the Circulation of Shakespearean Imagination
Thea Buckley
Part 2 Religious and Cultural Negotiations
4 Religious Emotion and Racialization: Marlowe’s Sigismund and the Making
of Europe
Jennifer Feather
5 Solomon, Ophir, and the English Quest for the East Indies
Amrita Sen
6 Welfare and Work for All: King Lear and Poor Relief in China and Early
Modern England
Rachana Sachdev
Part 3 Making the English Stage Eastern
7 Staging China and India in Jacobean Court Masques: Negotiating Antiquity,
Admiration, and Authority in 1604
Emily Soon
8 Constructing the New Exchange: Jonson’s Entertainment at Britain’s Bourse
Richmond Barbour
Bibliography
About the Contributors
