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Eastern Figures: Orient and Empire in British Writing

Online ISBN:
9789882206892
Print ISBN:
9789622099340
Publisher:
Hong Kong University Press
Book

Eastern Figures: Orient and Empire in British Writing

Published:
1 June 2008
Online ISBN:
9789882206892
Print ISBN:
9789622099340
Publisher:
Hong Kong University Press

Abstract

This is a literary history that examines British writing about the East—centred on India but radiating as far as Egypt and the Pacific—in the colonial and postcolonial period. It takes as its subject “the East” that was real to the British imagination, largely the creation of writers who described and told stories about it, descriptions and stories coloured by the experience of empire and its aftermath. The book discusses the work of writers such as Stevenson, Kipling, Conrad, and Orwell, but also covers less-well-known literary authors, including Anglo-Indian romance writing, the reports and memoirs of administrators, and travel writing from Auden and Isherwood in China to Redmond O'Hanlon in Borneo. It produces a history of this writing by looking at a series of “figures” or tropes of representation through which successive writers sought to represent the East and the British experience of it—tropes such as exploring the hinterland, going native, and the figure of rule itself. The book raises issues of identity and representation; power and knowledge; and, centrally, the question of how to represent other people.

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