Contents

pp v-vi

List of Illustrations

pp vii-viii

Acknowledgements

pp ix-x

Introduction: Failures East and West – Cultural Encounters between East Asia and Europe

pp 1-12

Part I - Travellers and Failures

pp 13-14

1 - Imagining East Asia: The Failure of National Knowledge in Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations of the English Nation (1589–1600)

pp 15-28

2 - Fact and Fiction in the Writings of Wilhelm Joest about His Journey on Formosa in 1880

pp 29-48

3 - ‘An Honest Failure’: Simone de Beauvoir in China

pp 49-65

4 - Lost in Laos: Failure in Henri Mouhot’s and Stephen Greenblatt’s Travel Writing

pp 66-82

Part II - Encounters at Court

pp 83-84

5 - Louis XIV and the Kingdom of Siam: The Development and Failure of a Particular Example of Diplomatic and Intercultural Relations in the Colonial Era

pp 85-101

6 - Gender, Genre and the Truth Condition: Failure in Anna Leonowens’s The English Governess at the Siamese Court

pp 102-117

7 - Chinese Kotow and European Handshake: Episodes in the History of Intercultural Etiquette in China around 1900

pp 118-134

Part III - Contemporary Failures

pp 135-136

8 - Barthes and Bouvier in Japan: The Difficult Dialogue between Semiotics and Intercultural Communication

pp 137-151

9 - Between Failure and Empowerment: Historicity, Genre and Cultural Clashes in David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

pp 152-169

10 - Marx between East and West: The Karl Marx Statue in Trier as an Example of Intercultural Failure?

pp 170-187

Index

pp 188-195