Subversive Sketching: Intratextual Debate in British Accounts of China, 1797–1805

Abstract

This article focuses on the intratextual relationship between written and visual representations within George Staunton’s and John Barrow’s travel narratives (1797 and 1804 respectively) and William Alexander’s pictorial volumes (1797 and 1805) to underscore the ambiguity undergirding Romantic-era appraisals of China. These competing depictions disrupt narratives – beginning in the mid-nineteenth century – that expunge equivocal representation to perpetuate false teleological narratives of Anglo-Sino relations, culminating in familiar orientalist models.