A Female Poetics of Empire

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'. 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, focusing exclusively on female novelists, travel writers and painters of the turn-of-the-century exotic.

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.

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.