This volume examines the ways in which an intellectual vogue for a mythic China was a constituent element of British Modernism. Traditionally defined as a decorative style that conjured a fanciful and idealized notion of China, chinoiserie was revived in London's avant-garde circles, the Bloomsbury group, the Vorticists and others, who like their eighteenth-century forebears, turned to China as a cultural and aesthetic utopia. As part of Modernism's challenge to the 'universality' of so-called Western values and aesthetics, the turn to China would contribute much more than has been acknowledge ... More

This volume examines the ways in which an intellectual vogue for a mythic China was a constituent element of British Modernism. Traditionally defined as a decorative style that conjured a fanciful and idealized notion of China, chinoiserie was revived in London's avant-garde circles, the Bloomsbury group, the Vorticists and others, who like their eighteenth-century forebears, turned to China as a cultural and aesthetic utopia. As part of Modernism's challenge to the 'universality' of so-called Western values and aesthetics, the turn to China would contribute much more than has been acknowledged to Modernist thinking. As the book demonstrates, China as an intellectual and aesthetic utopia dazzled intellectuals and aesthetes, while at the same time the consumption of Chinese exoticism became commercialized. The essays cover performance and visual media, theatre, fashion, film and dance, interior and garden design, as well as literature, painting and poetry, showing that from cutting-edge Modernist chic to mass culture and consumer products, the vogue for chinoiserie style and motifs permeated the art and design of the period.