Het paviljoen van porselein : Nederlandse literaire chinoiserie en het westerse beeld van China (1250-2007)

Abstract

The thesis analyses the development of Western images of China from the first Franciscan missions to the Mongol court (c. 1250) up to 2007 and against that background discusses the development of Dutch views on China expressed in literary works (prose, poetry and theatre) and their relationship with the history of Western-Chinese relations and the development of Western knowledge about China. From 17th century plays by Joost van den Vondel and J. Antonides van der Goes inspired on the fall of the Ming-dynasty (1644), Dutch literary chinoiserie took many different forms and produced a wide variety of distorted views on the Middle Kingdom and its people and culture, views that tell us more about Western concerns and perceptions than about China itself. Within Dutch chinoiserie the discovery of Chinese poetry through translations into French, German and English stands out as a major trend between the two World Wars, inspiring translations and adaptations by many Dutch and Flemish poets which show a growing interest in Chinese philosophy and experiments with poetical forms with expressionist and Imagist tendencies inspired by (translated) Chinese poetry.