Douglas Kerr

Eastern Figures - Orient and Empire in British Writing

Eastern Figures is a literary history with a difference. It 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. It is bold in its scope, with a centre of gravity in the work of writers like Stevenson, Kipling, Conrad, and Orwell, but also covering less well-known literary authors, and 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. Eastern Figures 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. Eastern Figures is accessible to anyone interested in the literary and cultural history of empire and its aftermath. It will be of especial interest to students and scholars of colonial and postcolonial writing, as it raises issues of identity and representation, power and knowledge, and centrally the question of how to represent other people. It has original ideas and approaches to offer specialists in literary history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cultural historians, and researchers in colonial discourse analysis, postcolonial studies, and Asian area studies and history. It is also aimed at students in courses in literature and empire, culture and imperialism, and cross-cultural studies.

Orient and Empire in British Writing

Eastern Figures

Professor in the School of English Douglas Kerr

This study of one of the most popular of English poets explores the meaning in Wilfred Owen's life of the family, the Church, the Army and English poets of the past. It examines the language of these four communities, and shows how their discourses helped to mould the poet's own.

Language and Community

Wilfred Owen's Voices

Q.S. Tong

Shouren Wang

Despite globalizing forces, whether economic, political, or cultural, there remain conspicuous differences that divide scholarly communities. How should we understand and respond to those discursive gaps among different traditions and systems of knowledge production? Critical Zone is a book series in cultural and literary studies that is concerned with current critical debates and intellectual preoccupations in the humanities. The series aims to improve understanding across cultures, traditions, discourses, and disciplines, and to produce international critical knowledge. Critical Zone is an expression of timely collaboration among scholars from Hong Kong, mainland China, the United States, and Europe, and conceived as an intellectual bridge between China and the rest of the world. The second volume of Critical Zone, as does its predecessor, consists of two parts. The first part includes original essays that deal with the concept and practice of "empire," as a collective response to the question of how imperial formations and operations, in the past and at present, should be examined in a larger context of international politics and how historical imperialism may be considered in relation to the conditions of our time. Part II includes two sets of translations of essays, first published in Chinese, about two recent debates in China: one on the canonicity of Lu Xun and the other on the problem of how to reform Peking University in the context of globalization. These two groups of translations are led by review essays that contextualize the debates.

A Forum of Chinese and Western Knowledge

Critical Zone 2

Conan Doyle: Writing, Profession, and Practice approaches Conan Doyle's writing in terms of themes such as sport, science, crime, and empire, finding within it a complex and surprising interpretation of a late-Victorian and early twentieth-century world, emerging into a troubling modernity.

Douglas Kerr

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