ABSTRACT
Raymond Dawson referred to the part played by English literature in constructions of ‘the willow-pattern world’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as ‘chinoiseries of the pen’.1 He refused to bring his study up to date, dismissing any such fiction since the start of the twentieth century as mere hackneyed reproduction of ‘vulgar chinoiserie quaintness’ blended with ‘“heathen Chinee” oddness and inferiority’, stating: ‘I do not think that we need to pursue the topic any further.’2 Since Said’s emphasis on Western Orientalism as a ‘textual attitude’, the significance of popular texts has been revalued, bound up as they are in the imaginative discourse which ‘produced’ the Orient.3 Even, or especially, at its most ‘vulgar’, chinoiserie demonstrates its continuing development as an autonomous style composed from an accumulation of texts and contexts which in turn modifies the European picture of the East. Robert Bickers has demonstrated this with regard to the effects of popular representations of Chineseness on the perceptions of England’s ‘treaty port mind’ in the 1920s:
In thrillers, on the stage, in romances and in film, in both children’s and adults’ literature, China and the Chinese – and the Chinese in Britain too – were represented to such an extent that those pleading for improvements in relations between Chinese and Britons routinely joked about the fact.4
