Failures East and West: Cultural Encounters between East Asia and Europe

by Ralf Hertel (Editor), Kirsten Sandrock (Editor)

Overview

Often, the story of encounters between Asia and the West has been told as one of success, of cross-fertilization, reciprocal stimulation and an exchange of commodities and knowledge. Yet, the history of East-West encounters is riddled with prominent examples of misunderstandings, ignorance, unrealistic expectations or unbridgeable cultural differences. Bringing together scholars working across Chinese Studies, Japanese Studies, English Studies and French Studies, this book presents new perspectives on such instances by theorizing epistemologies of failure. Providing examples from different periods and disciplines, it reveals how culturally informed expectations and biases, performative and linguistic practices and imaginative horizons specific to the cultures involved shape notions of failure and success. Case studies range from first encounters in the early modern period to contemporary novels and focus on actual or imaginary encounters between East Asia and Western European cultures.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399500517
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	04/17/2023
Series:	Edinburgh East Asian Studies
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

University of Trier, Germany

Kirsten Sandrock is Chair of English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Würzburg. Her research ranges from the early modern literature and culture to contemporary Anglophone studies, and she has published widely on intercultural encounters, colonial and postcolonial studies, Shakespeare, travel writing, gender and genre studies. She is the author of Scottish Colonial Literature: Writing the Atlantic, 1603–1707 (Edinburgh UniversityPress, 2021), co-editor of Locating Italy: East and West in British-Italian Transactions (2013) and of the Shakespeare Seminar Online.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations | Acknowledgements

Chapter 1: Introduction: Failures East and West – Cultural Encounters between East Asia and Europe - Ralf Hertel and Kirsten Sandrock

Part I: Travellers and Failures

Chapter 2: Imagining East Asia: The Failure of National Knowledge in Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations of the English Nation (1589–1600) - Ralf Hertel

Chapter 3: Fact and Fiction in the Writings of Wilhelm Joest about his Journey on Formosa in 1880 - Shaoji Yao

Chapter 4: ‘An Honest Failure’: Simone de Beauvoir in China - Ruth Y. Hung

Chapter 5: Lost in Laos: Failure in Henri Mouhot’s and Stephen Greenblatt’s Travel Writing - Barbara Schaff

Part II: Encounters at Court

Chapter 6: Louis XIV and the Kingdom of Siam: The Development and Failure of a Particular Example of Diplomatic and Intercultural Relations in the Colonial Era - Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink

Chapter 7: Gender, Genre and the Truth Condition: Failure in Anna Leonowens’s The English Governess at the Siamese Court - Kirsten Sandrock

Chapter 8: Chinese Kotow and European Handshake: Episodes in the History of Intercultural Etiquette in China around 1900 - Roland Altenburger

Part III: Contemporary Failures

Chapter 9: Barthes and Bouvier in Japan: The Difficult Dialogue between Semiotics and Intercultural Communication - Alex Demeulenaere

Chapter 10: Between Failure and Empowerment: Historicity, Genre and Cultural Clashes in David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet - Eva-Maria Windberger

Chapter 11: Marx Between East and West: The Karl Marx Statue in Trier as an Example of Intercultural Failure? -Christian Soffel

Index