Emma Newport | King's College London (original) (raw)
Papers by Emma Newport
King's College London Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Research... more King's College London Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Research Fashion, politics, popular culture and, at times, high culture, created trends that presented phases in the ways in which individuals responded to the influx of Chinese products and ideas. The relationship between the British and China was more nuanced than an unthinking mania driven by consumer instincts alone. As David Porter has shown, these peaks and troughs in interest and attitude occurred simultaneously, resulting in a constellation of responses that defy a 'chronological or schematically unilinear narrative on a vast and polyvalent body of material'. 14 China's distance and immensity, as well as the range and novelty of its products, philosophy, history and image, created diverse responses. Printed material sent over by missionaries and merchants gave a wider audience access to a mostly physically inaccessible land, which added to the emblematic images of and products from China that were displayed in European cabinets of curiosity. 15 Recent Scholarship on Relations between China and the West Occidental scholarship on relations between China and the West has proposed various strategies for analysis, focusing particularly on China, too large and distant to be dissected comprehensively, as representative of something other than itself alone. These representations include China as model; waxing to Europe's waning; waning to Europe's waxing; China as statue or monument; China as mirror; China and Europe in binary opposition; China as contradictory; China and Europe as dialectical; China as defined by its relationship with a single western nation.
Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 2018
While there are extensive records of Sir Joseph Banks’s lifetime of work, the “Dairy Book” is one... more While there are extensive records of Sir Joseph Banks’s lifetime of work, the “Dairy Book” is one of the few surviving documents that chart an aspect of the intellectual life of his wife, Lady Dorothea Banks. The Dairy Book represents a record of Dorothea’s interpretation of her porcelain collection, acquired through the Banks family’s international network of scholars, scientists, and manufacturers. Beginning with a discussion of its unusual materiality, this article argues that the Dairy Book is distanced from the ordinary book form and is instead closer to the porcelain collection in substance: occulted, disorderly, and excessive. The Dairy Book functions as a metonym for the porcelain collection and the substance itself. This article examines porcelain and the collector’s text as fictile material: a portable signifier and a repository for meanings that are shaped by the collector’s selection and display. The plasticity suggested by “fictile” destabilizes understandings of how me...
European Journal of Life Writing
Between 2012 and 2017, a contributor to Mumsnet, a popular parenting forum online, began recordin... more Between 2012 and 2017, a contributor to Mumsnet, a popular parenting forum online, began recording a third-person account under the pseudonym IamtheZombie, covering first her divorce and then her experience of cancer. In January 2017, IamtheZombie died. Preserved by MumsnetHQ, the threads form a tissue of posts: a text-culture that explores para-sociality between the living and the dead. Building on existing scholarship on digital life writing, on the afterlives of digital footprints and on recent work in the fields of memory studies, computing and neurobiology, this essay offers a new interdisciplinary framework for describing relationality in life writing on illness, dying and death: cytoarchitecture.
In the Hunterian Museum, the bones of Caroline Crachami, 'the Sicilian Fairy', are displayed; dyi... more In the Hunterian Museum, the bones of Caroline Crachami, 'the Sicilian Fairy', are displayed; dying on stage, the anatomist John Hunter bought and dissected her body. In the same museum hangs a portrait of Joseph Boruwlaski, a travelling performer and memoirist, who toured European courts and salons. This paper explores the contribution dwarfs made to Enlightenment ideas of masculinity and femininity, suggesting that Boruwlaski and Crachami function as microscopic versions of each. The tension between scientific reason and monstrous irrationality plays out in these case studies. Boruwlaski gained access to exclusive social spaces through a display of Enlightenment virtues and, by presenting himself as an Enlightened figure, he recorded his reflections on society and his body in The Memoirs of Count Joszef Boruwlaski: the curio become curious. At times popularising and at others resisting a narrative of imaginationism and maternal impressions, Boruwlaski simultaneously exploited his infantilisation and othering whilst challenging the discourse of monstrosity attached to his smaller frame. Contrastingly, Crachami became more firmly relegated to the role of curio through her extreme doll-like state: a passive, looked-at stage performer and object of fascination – and, ultimately, dissection.
The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2012
Talks by Emma Newport
The adoption of a Chinese aesthetic represents an eighteenth-century method of negotiating cultur... more The adoption of a Chinese aesthetic represents an eighteenth-century method of negotiating cultural value, particularly of the Chinese taste. Added to this, it offered eighteenth-century people a method of exploring the union of the dissimilar. Both the authentic and the inauthentic, Chinese objects and China itself, in its geographical and socio-cultural distance and its simultaneous proximity through objects on the mantelpiece, was a between-place: known and unknown; distant yet domestic. It was, simultaneously, vast and Imperial China and small and fragile china. These are not simple binaries, as China represented all of these versions of China, and more. The material metonymies imported into English environments created a metonymic gap: the objects become synecdochic of the original culture, whilst complexities of interpretation created a gap between place of origin and place of display. Because China was seen as an alternative, alien but recognisably civilised culture, this liminal gap became a location for intercultural exchange. The Bankses regarded this point of exchange as uniting the best of cultures and technologies in a process of ultimate advancement. Cross-cultural influences shaped the techniques and styles in which texts and artworks were being produced, resulting in new methods and media for production, whilst the mode and nature of collecting offers a way of reading the tensions and multiplicities of Occidental-Oriental interaction. The Chinese aesthetic demonstrates an urge to understand and to memorialise, an outward-looking gaze that provokes thinking and analysis, whilst simultaneously offering a means of solipsism and introspection.
King's College London Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Research... more King's College London Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Research Fashion, politics, popular culture and, at times, high culture, created trends that presented phases in the ways in which individuals responded to the influx of Chinese products and ideas. The relationship between the British and China was more nuanced than an unthinking mania driven by consumer instincts alone. As David Porter has shown, these peaks and troughs in interest and attitude occurred simultaneously, resulting in a constellation of responses that defy a 'chronological or schematically unilinear narrative on a vast and polyvalent body of material'. 14 China's distance and immensity, as well as the range and novelty of its products, philosophy, history and image, created diverse responses. Printed material sent over by missionaries and merchants gave a wider audience access to a mostly physically inaccessible land, which added to the emblematic images of and products from China that were displayed in European cabinets of curiosity. 15 Recent Scholarship on Relations between China and the West Occidental scholarship on relations between China and the West has proposed various strategies for analysis, focusing particularly on China, too large and distant to be dissected comprehensively, as representative of something other than itself alone. These representations include China as model; waxing to Europe's waning; waning to Europe's waxing; China as statue or monument; China as mirror; China and Europe in binary opposition; China as contradictory; China and Europe as dialectical; China as defined by its relationship with a single western nation.
Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 2018
While there are extensive records of Sir Joseph Banks’s lifetime of work, the “Dairy Book” is one... more While there are extensive records of Sir Joseph Banks’s lifetime of work, the “Dairy Book” is one of the few surviving documents that chart an aspect of the intellectual life of his wife, Lady Dorothea Banks. The Dairy Book represents a record of Dorothea’s interpretation of her porcelain collection, acquired through the Banks family’s international network of scholars, scientists, and manufacturers. Beginning with a discussion of its unusual materiality, this article argues that the Dairy Book is distanced from the ordinary book form and is instead closer to the porcelain collection in substance: occulted, disorderly, and excessive. The Dairy Book functions as a metonym for the porcelain collection and the substance itself. This article examines porcelain and the collector’s text as fictile material: a portable signifier and a repository for meanings that are shaped by the collector’s selection and display. The plasticity suggested by “fictile” destabilizes understandings of how me...
European Journal of Life Writing
Between 2012 and 2017, a contributor to Mumsnet, a popular parenting forum online, began recordin... more Between 2012 and 2017, a contributor to Mumsnet, a popular parenting forum online, began recording a third-person account under the pseudonym IamtheZombie, covering first her divorce and then her experience of cancer. In January 2017, IamtheZombie died. Preserved by MumsnetHQ, the threads form a tissue of posts: a text-culture that explores para-sociality between the living and the dead. Building on existing scholarship on digital life writing, on the afterlives of digital footprints and on recent work in the fields of memory studies, computing and neurobiology, this essay offers a new interdisciplinary framework for describing relationality in life writing on illness, dying and death: cytoarchitecture.
In the Hunterian Museum, the bones of Caroline Crachami, 'the Sicilian Fairy', are displayed; dyi... more In the Hunterian Museum, the bones of Caroline Crachami, 'the Sicilian Fairy', are displayed; dying on stage, the anatomist John Hunter bought and dissected her body. In the same museum hangs a portrait of Joseph Boruwlaski, a travelling performer and memoirist, who toured European courts and salons. This paper explores the contribution dwarfs made to Enlightenment ideas of masculinity and femininity, suggesting that Boruwlaski and Crachami function as microscopic versions of each. The tension between scientific reason and monstrous irrationality plays out in these case studies. Boruwlaski gained access to exclusive social spaces through a display of Enlightenment virtues and, by presenting himself as an Enlightened figure, he recorded his reflections on society and his body in The Memoirs of Count Joszef Boruwlaski: the curio become curious. At times popularising and at others resisting a narrative of imaginationism and maternal impressions, Boruwlaski simultaneously exploited his infantilisation and othering whilst challenging the discourse of monstrosity attached to his smaller frame. Contrastingly, Crachami became more firmly relegated to the role of curio through her extreme doll-like state: a passive, looked-at stage performer and object of fascination – and, ultimately, dissection.
The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2012
The adoption of a Chinese aesthetic represents an eighteenth-century method of negotiating cultur... more The adoption of a Chinese aesthetic represents an eighteenth-century method of negotiating cultural value, particularly of the Chinese taste. Added to this, it offered eighteenth-century people a method of exploring the union of the dissimilar. Both the authentic and the inauthentic, Chinese objects and China itself, in its geographical and socio-cultural distance and its simultaneous proximity through objects on the mantelpiece, was a between-place: known and unknown; distant yet domestic. It was, simultaneously, vast and Imperial China and small and fragile china. These are not simple binaries, as China represented all of these versions of China, and more. The material metonymies imported into English environments created a metonymic gap: the objects become synecdochic of the original culture, whilst complexities of interpretation created a gap between place of origin and place of display. Because China was seen as an alternative, alien but recognisably civilised culture, this liminal gap became a location for intercultural exchange. The Bankses regarded this point of exchange as uniting the best of cultures and technologies in a process of ultimate advancement. Cross-cultural influences shaped the techniques and styles in which texts and artworks were being produced, resulting in new methods and media for production, whilst the mode and nature of collecting offers a way of reading the tensions and multiplicities of Occidental-Oriental interaction. The Chinese aesthetic demonstrates an urge to understand and to memorialise, an outward-looking gaze that provokes thinking and analysis, whilst simultaneously offering a means of solipsism and introspection.