Visar resultat för..."Blue Poppy"

In 1911, Francis Kingdon Ward (1885-1958) set off on his first solo expedition and collected hundreds of plant species, many previously unknown. From Burma, he headed into the Hengduan Mountains of north-western Yunnan province, exploring along the Mekong, Yangtze and Salween rivers in the region between eastern Tibet and western Sichuan. In 2003, this area was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. One of the world's most biodiverse temperate zones, its extraordinary topography arises from its position at the collision point of tectonic plates. This fascinating book, first published in 1913, was one of the most popular by a prolific author. It is generously illustrated with Kingdon Ward's own photographs and maps from the trip. The blue poppy of the title is Meconopsis speciosa, which Kingdon Ward described as the 'Cambridge blue poppy'; rather than the famous 'Tibetan blue poppy' (Meconopsis betonicifolia) that he later brought to England.

From the travel writing of the eccentric plant collector and Reginald Farrer, to Emily Hahn’s insider depictions of bohemian life in semi-colonial Shanghai, to Ezra Pound’s mediated ‘journeys’ to Southwest China via the explorer Joseph Rock – Anglo-American representations of China during the first half of the twentieth century were often unconventional in terms of style, form, and content. By examining a range of texts that were written in the flux of travel – including poems, novels, autobiographies – this study argues that the tumultuous social and political context of China’s Republican Period (1912-49) was a key setting for conceptualizing cultural modernity in global and transnational terms. In contrast with accounts that examine China’s influence on Western modernism through language, translation, and discourse, the book recovers a materialist engagement with landscapes, objects, and things as transcribed through travel, ethnographic encounter, and embodied experience. The book is organized by three themes which suggest formal strategies through which notions cultural modernity were explored or contested: borderlands, cosmopolitan performances, and mobile poetics. As it draws from archival sources in order to develop these themes, this study offers a place-based historical perspective on China’s changing status in Western literary cultures.

From the travel writing of the eccentric plant collector and Reginald Farrer, to Emily Hahn’s insider depictions of bohemian life in semi-colonial Shanghai, to Ezra Pound’s mediated ‘journeys’ to Southwest China via the explorer Joseph Rock – Anglo-American representations of China during the first half of the twentieth century were often unconventional in terms of style, form, and content. By examining a range of texts that were written in the flux of travel – including poems, novels, autobiographies – this study argues that the tumultuous social and political context of China’s Republican Period (1912-49) was a key setting for conceptualizing cultural modernity in global and transnational terms. In contrast with accounts that examine China’s influence on Western modernism through language, translation, and discourse, the book recovers a materialist engagement with landscapes, objects, and things as transcribed through travel, ethnographic encounter, and embodied experience. The book is organized by three themes which suggest formal strategies through which notions cultural modernity were explored or contested: borderlands, cosmopolitan performances, and mobile poetics. As it draws from archival sources in order to develop these themes, this study offers a place-based historical perspective on China’s changing status in Western literary cultures.