关键词: 东印度公司, 浪漫主义文学, 中国想象, 对蹠地

Abstract: Little scholarly attention has been paid to the relationship between the East India Company and the Chinese-writing of Romantic literature. Indeed, the Company's trading and diplomatic activities in China had multiple effects on English Romantic writers. On the one hand, the Company's travel notes, which included exploration, trade, and knowledge acquisition, and the various goods imported into Britain promoted the intercommunication and fusion of Eastern and Western cultures, and provided writers with rich and diversified materials and strange imaginations for their creations, and even the opium that the Company dumped in China in order to eliminate the dilemma of trade entry into the country became the hallucinogenic drug that inspired Coleridge, De Quincey, and others to inspire their poetic nature. On the other hand, the Company's diplomatic activities for its own interests, Sinological studies and literary translations, opened a window for Wordsworth and others to observe Chinese culture in many dimensions. However, Romantic writers often used China as a fantastical backdrop for their literary and emotional experiences, or the Far Eastern foil as an antipode to Superior Britishness, and from Charles Lamb to De Quincey, the fear and hatred of China increased rapidly. The complex and insidious relationship between the East India Company and Romantic literature demonstrates the complicity of commerce and literature in the alienation, mystification and even absurdification of the image of China, as well as the tension between East-West dichotomies and visions of cosmopolitanism in the confluence of commodities, literature and ideas.

Key words: East India Company, Romantic literature, imagination of China, antipode