Re Examining Nineteenth Century Easts: Gendered Narratives of Encounter

This collection reassesses and revitalises the gendered and gendering debates associated with nineteenth-century ‘Easts’. It offers novel conceptualisations and methodologies to fictions and travel writing in and of the cultural, geographical and ideological contexts surrounding the nineteenth-century Easts, from the Balkans to the Far East. Three decades after the ground-breaking work of critics like Sara Mills, Billie Melman and Reina Lewis, Re-examining nineteenth-century Easts brings together international scholars to reassess and revitalise the gendered and gendering debates associated with nineteenth-century ‘East’ or, rather, ‘Easts’ as the editors suggest in this volume. The chapters renew an interest in issues of representation as they cover a century of literary imaginaries and non-fictional accounts about Eastern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, India, China, South-East Asia, and Japan. More importantly, they draw on a wide range of thematic and conceptual foci: landscape, race, identity, politics, social class, domestic life, science, religion and visual arts. Drawing on various critical and methodological approaches – from colonial discourse analysis to postcolonial theory, poetics to the geohumanities, theories of the body and affect to identity politics – the chapters study and critically update formations of gender in relation to sites and lives considered ‘Other’ and ‘East’ of the nineteenth-century British world. Thanks to its provocative critical framework, its analyses of lesser-studied authors and its innovative, interdisciplinary reconceptualisation of the Easts, the volume moves forward a debate that has ongoing social and critical relevance. Re-examining nineteenth-century Easts contributes novel approaches to gendered and gendering fictions and travel writing in and of the cultural-geographical-ideological contexts surrounding nineteenth-century Easts. It examines underexplored stories of travel and narratives of encounter to reconsider the western allure of travelling to the Easts – from the Balkans to the Middle and Far East, through a range of diverse critical approaches. It discusses writers – travellers, novelists, and short-story writers – who authored texts based on their varied experiences in eastern lands. It also analyses how views of eastern places became a rich source of material for identity formations related to Empire but also discussions about masculinity and femininity at ‘home’.