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YU LIU. Seeds of a Different Eden: Chinese Gardening Ideas and a New English Aesthetic Ideal. Columbia: South Carolina, 2008. Pp. x + 208. $39.95.
The past several years have seen a proliferation of new books concerned with European responses to China - and to things and ideas and challenges Chinese - in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Among the more notable are Robert Markley's The Far East in the English Imagination : 1600-1730 (Cam bridge), Elizabeth Chang's Britain's Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford), and Adrienne Ward's Pagodas in Play: China on the Eighteenth-Century Italian Opera Stage (Bucknell). The development is welcome in eighteenth-century studies, where research on cross-cultural reflections and encounters has been too frequently confined to histories of colonialism and orientalism.
Mr. Liu's topic, the engagement of British eighteenth-century writers with Chinese ideas on gardening, has been frequently treated, most famously in Lovejoy's, "The Chinese Origin of a Romanticism" (1933), and continues to attract attention (see, for example, Tony Brown, "Joseph Addison and the Pleasures of Sharawadgi," 2007).
The book makes ambitious claims. We learn that the Chinese approach to landscape gardening (along with the...