Asian Awakenings

Alicia Little and the Limits of Orientalism

Bibliographic Data

ID12411409
AuthorsShanyn Fiske (Rutgers Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume37
Issue1
Pages11-25
Publication date2009-02-05
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueVictorian Literature and Culture (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1060-1503 • E-ISSN: 1470-1553
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s1060150309090020
OpenAlexW2134829225
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited22

Visiting a missionary school for girls in the central Chinese city of Chungking in the early 1890s, British writer Alicia Little entertained some disquieting thoughts about instilling Western values in Chinese children. Her reflections in Intimate China on the benefits and hazards of such teaching instance Britain's increasingly conflicted views of China in the last decades of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, the passage manifests the long-held Victorian view that the Chinese mind and culture had lain dormant for at least a century and needed Western aid to awaken them to their full potential. On the other hand, her unease about children made “susceptible of outside influences” admits both to the limited effects of Western teaching on entrenched Chinese traditions and to the dubious advantages of alienating individuals from the values of the country that must house their futures. Writing some thirty years after the Second Opium Wars, which formally opened China to foreign traders, travelers, and missionaries, and less than a decade before the Boxer Rebellion, in which thousands of foreigners and Chinese Christians were massacred in retaliations against Western influences, Little's observations foreground pivotal problems in Britain's evolving relationship with China as well as dispute conventional models of East-West relations in the nineteenth century

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · China · Chinese culture · Futures contract · Literature · Orientalism · Western culture · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Japanese History and Culture · Travel Writing and Literature

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