A Female Poetics of Empire
World of Books
The feel-good place to buy books
A Female Poetics of Empire by Julia Kuehn
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.
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.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780415712415 |
| ISBN 10 | 0415712416 |
| Title | A Female Poetics of Empire |
| Author | Julia Kuehn |
| Series | Routledge Studies In Nineteenth Century Literature |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Routledge |
| Year published | 2013-10-23 |
| Number of pages | 254 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |