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.
| ISBN: | 9780415712415 |
| Publication date: | 23rd October 2013 |
| Author: | Julia Kuehn |
| Publisher: | Routledge an imprint of Taylor & Francis Ltd |
| Format: | Hardback |
| Pagination: | 254 pages |
| Series: | Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature |
| Genres: |
The arts: general topics History of art Cultural studies Sociology Ethnic studies Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 Paintings and painting Literary studies: postcolonial literature Gender studies: women and girls Poetry |