“Luxury” and “the Surprising” in Sir William Chambers’s Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772): Commercial Society and Burke’s Sublime-Effect

  • Yue Zhuang (Author)
    University Research Priority Program 'Asia and Europe' University of Zurich

    ZHUANG Yue is a postdoctoral research fellow and Marie Curie fellow at the URPP Asia and Europe, University of Zurich, and a lecturer in School of Architecture, Tianjin University. Her articles are seen in books such as From the things themselves: Architecture and Phenomenology (Kyoto University Press, 2012) and journals such as Zhongguo yuanlin [Landscape Architecture]. She is currently leading an EU Marie Curie project ‘Matteo Ripa’s “Views of Jehol”: Entangled histories and 18th Century European and Chinese landscape representations,’ to which the article is integrated.

Identifiers (Article)

Abstract

This paper examines oriental landscape scenes of “luxury” and of “the surprising” as described by Sir William Chambers (1726–1796) in his Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772), and analyses them in relation to Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime and the beautiful. I argue that Chambers’s depiction of these landscape scenes was motivated by a commitment to the importance of maintaining martial virtues in commercial and civil societies. The Dissertation puts forward the role of the surprising scenes for maintaining military vigour in coexistence with the landscape of luxury. For Chambers, landscape is a site for shaping citizens’ sensations and virtues. Chambers articulated his sensationalist landscape, which was deeply influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment discourses of physiology, virtue, and commerce theory, through the disguise of a Chinese garden. The Dissertation provides an important example of how discourses on the building of Britain’s identity operated through allegory within the framework of cultural interaction between Asia and Europe during the early modern period.

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Published
2013-12-20
Type, method or approach
entangled histories
How to Cite
Zhuang, Y. (2013). “Luxury” and “the Surprising” in Sir William Chambers’s Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772): Commercial Society and Burke’s Sublime-Effect. The Journal of Transcultural Studies, 4(2), 45–76. https://doi.org/10.11588/ts.2013.2.10072