Table of Contents

1: A Classical Cathay and a Real China
2: 'Ancestral Voices Prophesying War': Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edward Gibbon, and the Warnings of History
3: The White Snake, Apollonius of Tyana, and John Keats's Lamia
4: Charles Lamb, Roast Pork, and Willow Crockery
5: Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay': British Progress, the Opium Trade, and Tennyson's Retrospection
6: A Greek Tragedy in China: Thomas de Quincey's Opium Wars Journalism
7: 'From those flames no light': The Summer Palace in 1860 and Beyond
8: Coda: 'All things fall and are built again': Yeats's Daoist Optimism and the Fall of the Qing Empire
Appendix: Sara Coleridge, 'Tennyson's "Lotos-Eaters" with a New Conclusion'

About the Author

Chris Murray is Lecturer in Literary Studies at Monash University. He is the author of Tragic Coleridge (2013), and Crippled Immortals (2018) -- a memoir about Zen martial-arts masters -- and has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society.

Reviews

Rich and interesting ... this is not a work in classical reception, nor yet in the reception of China in Europe, but those interested in either field will read this book with profit and pleasure.
*Alexander Beecroft, Bryn Mawr Classical Review*