A01=Anne Veronica Witchard
Al Seas
Author_Anne Veronica Witchard
British imperial culture
Broken Blossoms
Category=DSBH
Category=DSK
causeway
China Town
chinaman
Chinatown
cultural anxieties in British literature
De Quincey's Views
De Quincey’s Views
Deepest Red
East End News
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
fin-de-siA?cle London
gender and diaspora analysis
john
John Chinaman
Kama Shastra Society
limehouse
Limehouse Causeway
Limehouse Nights
literary race representation
Local History Archive
London Spy
London's Chinatown
London’s Chinatown
nights
Opium Den
orientalism studies
peril
rohmer
San Toy
sax
Sax Rohmer
Victor Plarr
Wee Willie Winkie
west
West India Dock Road
yellow
Yellow Claw
Yellow Man
Yellow Peril
yellow peril discourse
Young Men
Yuanming Yuan
Product details
- ISBN 9780754658641
- Weight: 680g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 23 Sep 2009
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Focusing on Thomas Burke's bestselling collection of short stories, Limehouse Nights (1916), this book contextualises the burgeoning cult of Chinatown in turn-of-the-century London. London's 'Chinese Quarter' owed its notoriety to the Yellow Perilism that circulated in Britain at the fin-de-siècle, a demonology of race and vice masked by outward concerns about degenerative metropolitan blight and imperial decline. Anne Witchard's interdisciplinary approach enables her to displace the boundaries that have marked Chinese studies, literary studies, critiques of Orientalism and empire, gender studies, and diasporic research, as she reassesses this critical moment in London's history. In doing so, she brings attention to Burke's hold on popular and critical audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. A much-admired and successful author in his time, Burke in his Chinatown stories destabilizes social orthodoxies in highly complex and contradictory ways. For example, his writing was formative in establishing the 'queer spell' that the very mention of Limehouse would exert on the public imagination, and circulating libraries responded to Burke's portrayal of a hybrid East End where young Cockney girls eat Chow Mein with chopsticks in the local cafés and blithely gamble their housekeeping money at Fan Tan by banning Limehouse Nights. Witchard's book forces us to rethink Burke's influence and shows that China and chinoiserie served as mirrors that reveal the cultural disquietudes of western art and culture.
Anne Witchard is a Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Westminster, UK
