Female Poetics of Empire

<p>Many well-known <i>male</i> 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 <i>female</i> writers contribute to colonial fiction?</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p>