Output details

Thomas Burke's dark chinoiserie: Limehouse nights and the queer spell of Chinatown

The Acknowledgements pages (viii-ix) of Thomas Burke's Dark Chinoiserie cite earlier versions of some material to be found in four essays published by Witchard prior to 2008. 1. ‘Thomas Burke, the “Laureate of Limehouse”: A New Biographical Outline’, English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, 48:2 (2005) has no actual overlap with this book, though it provides some biographical background to it. 2. ‘Aspects of Literary Limehouse: Thomas Burke and the "Glamorous Shame of Chinatown"’, originally published in the online Literary London (2004), contains some material that is re-worked in small parts across different chapters (pp. 94, 99-100, 132, 148, 151, 169), adding up to about five pages in total. 3. ‘Thomas Burke: Son of London’, in A Mighty Mass of Brick and Smoke, ed. Lawrence Phillips (2007), contains elements that are re-worked over about eight pages in Chapter 12 (pp. 159-167, 170-1). 4. ‘A Threepenny Omnibus Ticket to Limeyhousey Causeyway: Fictional Sojourns in Chinatown’, Comparative Critical Studies (2007), also contains content that is re-used across the monograph in different places, adding up to less than seven pages in total. In combination, previously published material amounts to less than 10% of the monograph as a whole.

This output positions Burke’s Limehouse fiction within a tradition of literary chinoiseries, and required research time beyond that normal for a ‘single-author study’. Considering its object as a crux of cultural activity both synchronically across different media and diachronically across eras entailed the collection of diverse information on chinoiserie in nineteenth and twentieth-century popular culture as well as literature, including extensive archival research at the Theatre Museum Library, Museum of London, Tower Hamlets Local History Archive, Lilly Library MS Dept, University of Indiana (which holds Burke’s papers), Surrey Records Office, Gernsheim Photographic Collection, University of Texas and the British Library.