YCBA Building Conservation Project 2013
Yale Center for British Art
Building Conservation Project 2013
This summer and fall the Yale Center for British Art will complete the first phase of a major building conservation project. Beginning in June and continuing through early January 2014, the Center will refurbish its Study Room and areas used by the departments of Prints and Drawings and Rare Books and Manuscripts.
During the renovations, the second- and third-floor galleries will be closed and there will be no access to the Prints and Drawings and Rare Books and Manuscripts collections from June 4 through August 30. Beginning in September, access to the collections, which will remain in the building, will be by appointment only. Requests for appointments and materials will require at least two weeks’ notice. Center staff will make every effort to accommodate the needs of faculty, students, and scholars. The Reference Library will keep normal hours, although there will be periods of disruption.
Records of both departments’ collections are available via an online search on the Center’s website. Orbis, the online catalogue of the Yale Libraries, provides access to material from Rare Books as well as other Yale departments. The Yale Finding Aid Database offers detailed descriptions of the Rare Books Department’s archival collections, along with other archives at Yale.
The permanent collection will remain on view in the fourth-floor galleries. It is expected that normal services in the Study Room will resume by early January 2014. Details will be circulated as they become known.
Contact details
Requests for materials from the departments of Prints and Drawings and Rare Books and Manuscripts should be made at least two weeks in advance by e-mailing ycba.prints@yale.edu
For questions about Prints and Drawings collections:
Gillian Forrester, Curator of Prints and Drawings, gillian.forrester@yale.edu
For questions about Rare Books and Manuscripts collections:
Elisabeth Fairman, Senior Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, elisabeth.fairman@yale.edu
Inquiries about the Reference Library:
Kraig Binkowski, Chief Librarian, kraig.binkowski@yale.edu
New Book | A Taste for China
From Cambridge UP:
Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins, A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-0199950980, $74.
Challenging existing narratives of the relationship between China and Europe, this study establishes how modern English identity evolved through strategies of identifying with rather than against China. Through an examination of England’s obsession with Chinese objects throughout the long eighteenth century, A Taste for China argues that chinoiserie in literature and material culture played a central role in shaping emergent conceptions of taste and subjectivity.
Informed by sources as diverse as the writings of John Locke, Alexander Pope, and Mary Wortley Montagu, Zuroski Jenkins begins with a consideration of how literature transported cosmopolitan commercial practices into a model of individual and collective identity. She then extends her argument to the vibrant world of Restoration comedy-most notably the controversial The Country Wife by William Wycherley-where Chinese objects are systematically associated with questionable tastes and behaviors. Subsequent chapters draw on Defoe, Pope, and Swift to explore how adventure fiction and satirical poetry use chinoiserie to construct, question, and reimagine the dynamic relationship between people and things. The second half of the eighteenth century sees a marked shift as English subjects anxiously seek to separate themselves from Chinese objects. A reading of texts including Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and Jonas Hanway’s Essay on Tea shows that the enthrallment with chinoiserie does not disappear, but is rewritten as an aristocratic perversion in midcentury literature that prefigures modern sexuality. Ultimately, at the century’s end, it is nearly disavowed altogether, which is evinced in works like Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey.
Eugenia Jenkins is Assistant Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University.
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C O N T E N T S
Introduction: ‘China’ and The Prehistory of Orientalism
1. The Cosmopolitan Nation, ‘Where Order in Variety We See’
2. The Chinese Touchstone of the Tasteful Imagination
3. Defoe’s Trinkets: Fiction’s Spectral Traffic
4. ‘Nature to Advantage Drest’: The Poetry of Subjectivity
5. How Chinese Things Became Oriental
6. Disenchanting China: Orientalism and the English Novel
Afterword: Rethinking Modern Taste
Enfilade 
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