Eastern Figures
- Literature history
- Categories:Theory
- Language:English(Translation Services Available)
- Publication date:
- Pages:264
- Retail Price:175.00 HKD
- Size:156mm×234mm
- Page Views:14
- Words:(Unknown)
- Star Ratings:
- Text Color:Black and white
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Review
“Douglas Kerr’s thoughtful and thought-provoking engagement with British writing about Eastern peoples and places is a valuable addition to the critical literature that has responded to the challenge of Said’s Orientalism. Through exemplary attentive close readings of writers from Kipling to Redmond O’Hanlon, while drawing on the resources of deeper historical reading, Kerr displays some of the governing tropes of the British imperial imagination. Eastern Figures avoids the programmatic and formulaic: it provides, instead, a continuously inventive re-visioning of the British encounter with ‘the East’.” —Robert Hampson, Professor of Modern Literature, Royal Holloway College, University of London
Description
It is bold in its scope, with a centre of gravity in the work of writers like Stevenson, Kipling, Conrad, and Orwell, but also covering less well-known literary authors, and including Anglo-Indian romance writing, the reports and memoirs of administrators, and travel writing from Auden and Isherwood in China to Redmond O’Hanlon in Borneo. Eastern Figures produces a history of this writing by looking at a series of “figures” or tropes of representation through which successive writers sought to represent the East and the British experience of it—tropes such as exploring the hinterland, going native, and the figure of rule itself.
Eastern Figures is accessible to anyone interested in the literary and cultural history of empire and its aftermath. It will be of especial interest to students and scholars of colonial and postcolonial writing, as it raises issues of identity and representation, power and knowledge, and centrally the question of how to represent other people. It has original ideas and approaches to offer specialists in literary history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cultural historians, and researchers in colonial discourse analysis, postcolonial studies, and Asian area studies and history. It is also aimed at students in courses in literature and empire, culture and imperialism, and cross-cultural studies.