Focus of both Men and Women's Aesthetic Appreciation and Desire: An Analysis of Chinese China in the Eighteenth-Century English Poetry.

The Chinese china represented in the eighteenth-century English poetry is the focus of both men and women's aesthetic appreciation and desire. Men reduce women to the object of their aesthetic appreciation and desire by drawing an analogy between china and women and by objectifying women into china, whereas women, by means of requesting, seeing and consuming china, foreground their subjectivity and value by projecting their aesthetic appreciation and desire onto the beautiful and delicate china. In addition, women dissolve and transcend the binary opposition between "earthenware/man" and "china/women" constructed by the male-centered discourse through endowing china with multi-gender and multi-identity. The end of the eighteenth century witnesses the fall of Chinese china in English society; hence it has lost its focal position and been replaced by other materials as the above-mentioned focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]