The English Renaissance and the Far East: Cross-Cultural Encounters is
an original and timely examination of cultural encounters between
Britain, China, and Japan. It challenges accepted, Anglocentric models
of East-West relations and offers a radical reconceptualization of the
English Renaissance, suggesting it was not so different from current
developments in an increasingly Sinocentric world, and that as China, in
particular, returns to a global center-stage that it last occupied
pre-1800, a curious and overlooked synergy exists between the early
modern and the present. Prompted by the current eastward tilt in global
power, in particular towards China, Adele Lee examines cultural
interactions between Britain and the Far East in both the early modern
and postmodern periods. She explores how key encounters with and
representations of the Far East are described in early modern writing,
and demonstrates how work of that period, particularly Shakespeare, has
a special power today to facilitate encounters between Britain and East
Asia. Readers will find the past illuminating the present and vice versa
in a book that has at its heart resonances between Renaissance and
present-day cultural exchanges, and which takes a cyclical, "long-view"
of history to offer a new, innovative approach to a subject of
contemporary importance.
