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Dissertation Information for Robert Kinnaird Batchelor Jr.

NAME:
- Robert Kinnaird Batchelor Jr.

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (1999)

ADVISORS:
- David Warren Sabean
- John Brewer

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Benjamin A. Elman
- Peter H. Reill
- Haun Saussy
- Felicity Nussbaum

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: The European aristocratic imaginary and the Eastern paradise: Europe, Islam and China, 1100-1780

Abstract: The dissertation investigates changes in the social imaginary of the European aristocracy, which centered on the garden as a space of social and cultural production, to argue that first Islam and later China played an integral role in the formation of conceptions of both aristocratic society and later the nation in Europe. The nineteenth-century institution of Orientalism as a scholarly and literary form of writing about the East cannot be understood without an historical understanding of its basis in earlier aristocratic attempts to define and maintain their class status in emerging nation-states by drawing upon cultural models perceived as external and superior to Europe. An interest in the unique combination of sensuality and erotic love with formal geometry and a strict ordering of nature in the Islamic garden drove this process during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, while in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially in England, the "irregular" nature of the Chinese garden with its "management of contrasts" and "concealment of the bounds" captivated the attention of a "patriotic" and nationally oriented aristocracy and gentry. These exchanges came out of, and were in turn shaped by, a formal commerce in writings and images that developed first locally in the Mediterranean and then globally between Europe and China.

MPACT Scores for Robert Kinnaird Batchelor Jr.

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-09-29 11:36:07

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Students under Robert Kinnaird Batchelor Jr.

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None