A Female Poetics of Empire: From Eliot to Woolf Contributor(s): Kuehn, Julia (Author) |
|
ISBN: 0415712416 ISBN-13: 9780415712415 Publisher: Routledge OUR PRICE: $161.50 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: October 2013 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | Feminist - Literary Criticism | Women Authors - Art | History - Romanticism |
Dewey: 820.932 |
LCCN: 2013025205 |
Series: Routledge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature |
Physical Information: 0.8" H x 6.2" W x 9" (1.05 lbs) 254 pages |
Themes: - Sex & Gender - Feminine - Cultural Region - British Isles |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: 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. |