Many well-known male writers produced fictions about colonial spaces and discussed the advantages of realism over romance, and vice versa, in the ‘art of fiction’ debate of the 1880s; but how did female writers contribute to colonial fiction?
This volume links fictional, non-fictional and pictorial representations of a colonial otherness with the late nineteenth-century artistic concerns about representational conventions and possibilities. The author explores these texts and images through the postcolonial framework of ‘exoticism’, arguing that the epistemological dilemma of a ‘self’ encountering an ‘other’ results in the interrelated predicament to find poetic modalities – mimetic, realistic and documentary on the one hand; romantic, fantastic and picturesque on the other – that befit an ‘exotic’ representation. Thus women writers did not only participate in the making of colonial fictions but also in the late nineteenth-century artistic debate about the nature of fiction.
This book maps the epistemological concerns of exoticism and of difference – self and other, home and away, familiarity and strangeness – onto the representational modes of realism and romance. The author focuses exclusively on female novelists, travel writers and painters of the turn-of-the-century exotic, and especially on neglected authors of academically under-researched genres such as the bestselling novel and the travelogue.
By:
Julia Kuehn
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Weight: 453g
ISBN: 9781138377431
ISBN 10: 1138377430
Series: Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature
Pages: 268
Publication Date: 23 August 2018
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Primary
,
A / AS level
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
1. Exoticism as System: Difference and Representation 2. Beyond Orientalism: Exoticising Daniel Deronda 3. Desire, Love and Mixed-Race Children: Plotting Anglo-Indian Popular Fiction 4. Women’s Orientalist Harem Paintings: Gender, Documentation and Imagination 5. Veiled Narratives, Double Identities: Women’s Travelogues about the Middle East 6. Picturesque Views of Cairo: Touring the Land, Framing the Foreign 7. Infelicities: Representing Hot Love in the Popular Women’s Desert Romance 8. Modernist Exoticism: The Voyage Out and In. Conclusion.
Julia Kuehn is Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong where she teaches courses on nineteenth-century British literature and culture. She has published widely on women’s, popular and Empire fiction, as well as on travel writing.