Amy Matthewson, ”Cartooning China: Punch, Power, & Politics in the Victorian Era” (Routledge, 2022)

Dr. Amy Matthewson's Cartooning China: Punch, Power, & Politics in the Victorian Era (Routledge, 2022) explores the series of cartoons of China and the Chinese that were published in the popular British satirical magazine Punch over a sixty-year period from 1841 to 1901. Filled with political metaphors and racial stereotypes, these illustrations served as a powerful tool in both reflecting and shaping notions and attitudes towards China at a tumultuous time in Sino-British history. A close reading of both the visual and textual satires in Punch reveals how a section of British society visualised and negotiated with China as well as Britain’s position in the global community. By contextualising Punch’s cartoons within the broader frameworks of British socio-cultural and political discourse, the Dr. Matthewson engages in a critical enquiry of popular culture and its engagements with race, geopolitical propaganda, and public consciousness. This book will interest scholars and researchers of cultural studies, political history and Empire, Chinese studies, popular culture, Victoriana, as well as media studies comics-based research.

Dr. Amy Matthewson has a PhD degree in history from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), at the University of London, in the UK. Dr. Matthewson is a historian interested in representation through visual and material culture, in particular the ways in which China and Chinese communities were understood by Western nations in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with specific interest in Britain’s relationship with China. She is currently teaching history at University of Iceland.

Elizabeth Allyn Woock an assistant professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Palacky University in the Czech Republic with an interdisciplinary background in history and popular literature. Her specialization falls within the study of comic books and graphic novels.

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