Books
Cartooning China: ‘Punch,’ Power, & Politics in the Victorian Era
Nominated for the 2024 European Society for Periodical Research (ESPRit) Prize for substantial contribution to the field of European periodical studies.
This book explores the series of cartoons of China and the Chinese in the popular British satirical magazine Punch that were created over a sixty-year period from 1841-1901. 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. By contextualising Punch’s cartoons within the broader frameworks of British socio-cultural and political discourse, the book engages in a critical enquiry of popular culture and its engagements with race, geopolitical propaganda, and public consciousness.
The book launch talk was held at the Royal Asiatic Society in May 2022. Watch here.
Chapter in Books
Translating Asian Texts and Translation: China
Co-authored with T.H. Barrett, in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Romanticism in Britain and Asia, 1760-1842, edited by Peter J. Kitson, Rosinka Chaudhuri, and Alex Watson. Bloomsbury Publishing, forthcoming.
Intercultural Interactions: Isabella Bird and her Chinese Interpreter and Guides
in China 1800s: Material and Visual Culture, edited by Jessica Harrison-Hall. London: The British Museum, 2024.
DOI: 10.48582/pma9-2603
ISBN: 9780861592418
Articles
George Du Maurier’s Visual Degeneration: Chinamaniacs and China in the British Imagination
ImageTexT, Vol. 15, Issue 1 (2024), online: www.imagetextjournal.com/matthewson-george.
ISSN: 1549-6732
Satirising Imperial Anxiety in Victorian Britain: Representing Japan in Punch Magazine, 1852-1893
Contemporary Japan, Vol. 33, Issue 2 (2021): pp. 201-224.
DOI: 10.1080/18692729.2021.1926410
Cui Malo? Cui Bono? Reflections on a Literary Forgery: The Case of The Memoirs of Li Hung Chang
Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2021): pp. 19-34.
DOI: 10.1353/pan.2021.0001
The (Mis)Representation of Reality: ‘Knowledge’ and Image-Making in Glass Lantern Slides of China
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 31, Issue 2 (2021): pp. 303-319.
DOI: 10.1017/S135618631900052X
Cartooning Anxieties of Empire: The First Sino-Japanese War and Imperial Rivalries in Punch
Ming Qing Studies, edited by Paolo Santangelo (2018): pp. 231-247.
ISBN 978-88-85629-38-7