Botanical Journeys and China's Colonial Frontiers: 1840-1940

Over recent years, a body of scholarship has emerged on the topic of European and American travel writing in China. This thesis contributes to this growing field by examining four writers who travelled in China and worked as plant collectors and botanists. Largely forgotten today, these writers were influential and successful in their own day. Despite differences in geographical location and historical period, there are a number of common links that make a comparison of these travel writings productive. As travellers seeking botanical rarity and novelty, these writers explored regions of China unknown in the West, which over a period of one hundred years expanded outwards from the fringes of the treaty port areas to more remote regions of China's southwest. These writers, therefore, were on the frontiers of Western knowledge of China, and an examination of their writing provides important insights into the ways in which racial, geographical, and ecological differences were articulated and understood in the context of colonial and scientific exploration. While discussing how such differences have imperial significance, this study will also call attention to the instability of colonialist discourse in the context of China. Rather than focus exclusively on questions of imperialism, this study will show how representations of China's periphery regions also speak to metropolitan literary and cultural concerns, and a close reading of these travel writings shows that China offered powerful imaginary landscapes for home audiences. This project is organised chronologically and the chapters are divided according to the authors, with the exception of the first chapter where I introduce the historical and theoretical framework of the study and the final concluding chapter where I consider the significance of this study in the context of modern China

Terroir in Tibet: Wine Production, Identity, and Landscape Change in Shangri-La, China.

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2017

‘The Bridge’: How The Penguin New Writing (1940-1950) shaped twentieth-century responses to China

This thesis examines the short stories about China by Chinese and British writers published in the journal The Penguin New Writing (1940-1950). The writers were responding to a traumatic period in history spanning part of the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II and its aftermath. TPNW, promoted contemporary writing from around the world and was open both to well-established and little-known writers. Penguin Books’ founder, Allen Lane, backed the journal which had a circulation of 100,000 at its peak and established John Lehmann as one of the finest literary editors of wartime Britain. To date, there has been scant critical analysis of Lehmann’s international venture, and none at all of his interest in modern Chinese literature. Yet his political, aesthetic and personal approach to China provides a fascinating study of the ways in which those on the British Left sought to increase sympathy for the country and its people and how Lehmann redrew representations of the country for his Anglophone readers. This thesis benefited significantly from a dissertation fellowship to visit Lehmann’s editorial archive at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, where a wealth of previously unseen correspondence between the editor and his Chinese and British writers was discovered. These letters enabled the piecing together of a narrative about Sino-British literary crossings in the 1940s, as well as a reappraisal of neglected Chinese writers Ye Junjian and Kenneth Lo among others. During the decade of TPNW’s existence attitudes towards the Chinese in Britain, particularly on the British Left, became increasingly sympathetic and this thesis evaluates Lehmann’s contribution to ‘the vogue’ for Chinese stories in the mid 1940s. In this heyday for Chinese writers, they sought to push against established Sinophobic stereotypes but as this thesis concludes, there remained limits to British interest in the plight of the Chinese people

"Plant hunting" in the Context of Science, Culture and Mentality in the 19th and Early 20th Century

Práce se zabývá fenoménem "plant-huntingu" a "plant-hunterů" (tzv. lovu a lovců rostlin) charakteristickým zejména pro Viktoriánskou a meziválečnou Británii. Tento fenomén definuji, personálně vymezuji a zasazuji do času a prostoru. Následně se jej pokouším vysvětlit. Zaměřuji se především na otázky, proč fenomén vznikl v dané době a místě, proč a zda vůbec zanikl a zda byl eventuálně něčím substituován a čím. Ptám se, co existence tohoto fenoménu vypovídá o lidském vztahu k rostlinám a živému světu jako takovému. Fenomén se při tom pokouším nahlédnout prostřednictvím rostliny představující objekty zájmu, tj. úlovky "plant-hunterů." Právě ty považuji za klíč k pochopení fenoménu. Proto se snažím ukázat, co je odlišuje od ostatních rostlin. Konfrontuji tyto rostliny s výsledky recentních výzkumů fytofilie a se schématy v obecnější lidské percepci přírodního světa. Dále se pro ně pokouším nalézt vhodné funkčně typologické pojmenování a zařadit je do teoretického výkladového rámce. Celý fenomén nahlížím v kontextu dobové vědy, technologie, politiky a společnosti.This dissertation examines the phenomenon of 'plant-hunting' and 'plant-hunters' characteristic of Victorian and interwar Britain in particular. It defines and situates this phenomenon in time and space, and attempts to explain it. It primarily focuses on the questions of why the phenomenon arose in the given time and place, why and whether it disappeared at all, and whether it was eventually replaced by something and by what. It also examines what the existence of this phenomenon says about people's relationship to plants and the living world as such. The phenomenon is thus viewed through the plants sought by the plant-hunters themselves, and the plants are taken as the key to understanding the phenomenon. The work shows what distinguishes these particular plants from other plants. They are juxtaposed with the results of recent research on phytophilia, as well as with patterns in the more general human perception of the natural world. Furthermore, the work attempts to find appropriate functional-typological comprehensions, and places them within a theoretical explanatory framework. The whole phenomenon of plant-hunting is approached in the context of its era and contemporary science, technology, politics, and society.Katedra filosofie a dějin přírodních vědDepartment of Philosophy and History of SciencePřírodovědecká fakultaFaculty of Scienc