Jenny Fu is a senior in the College of Arts & Sciences double majoring in English and Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE). Her experiences living in China, Canada, and the U.S. fostered her interest in cross-cultural interaction and contributed to her passion for English and Chinese literature. Her research interests include 19th and 20th century literature, poetry and poetics, globalization, East-West contact, and translation. Her work in the Wolf Humanities Fellowship and the English Honors Program situates Romantic prose and poetry in the context of 19th-century Sino-British contact. Tracing opium as a historical commodity and literary symbol, she aims to explore the intersection of literature, politics, and culture in her project. Outside of the classroom, Jenny is involved in Penn Six A Cappella and the English Undergraduate Advisory Board. She also enjoys reading, creative writing, and taking long walks outdoors.
Ning Ning (Jenny) Fu
Wolf Humanities Center Undergraduate Fellow
2024—2025 Forum on Keywords
Ning Ning (Jenny) Fu
English; Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE)
Britain's Informal Empire in China: Opium and the Reconstruction of "the Orient" in Romantic Literature
In the 19th century, British imperialism grew in the Far East, and China became integral to British political and commercial interests. The years leading up to the Opium Wars witnessed Britain’s gradual creation of an informal empire in China. My project examines how the distinctive relation of informal empire in Sino-British contact shifts the construction of “the Orient” in Orientalist Romantic prose and poetry. Within this context, I analyze Thomas De Quincy’s autobiography, Confessions of an Opium Eater (1821), and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan” (1816), investigating the opium-induced states of liminal consciousness that simultaneously exhibit fascination and anxiety over an imagined Orient and a fantastically construed China. I characterize opium as a symbol connecting literature, politics and culture, contributing to scholarship intersecting empire, ethnography, imperial discourse, and cultural representation.