Exotic Subversions in Nineteenth-century French Fiction

Yees analyses are complex and subtle, but convincingly presented and supported by a wealth of examples. While the study would probably be of most interest to nineteenth-century specialists, she does give enough of an oversight of each novel to allow non-specialists to appreciate the originality of her insights.' -- French Review French Review An elegant and thoroughly researched monograph... a valuable reference for future work on exoticism, imperialism and postcolonial France. -- Forum for Modern Language Studies Forum for Modern Language Studies A highly effective demonstration of the use of postcolonial perspectives to open up new possibilities for our reading of the nineteenth century. -- Modern Language Review Modern Language Review Yee's text, stranded between the dogmatic (un)certainties of "1991" and the questions that have opened up in its ongoing aftermath, provides a salutary, if unintended, reminder of what it is that we, as postcolonial critics, have been invested in, and of what is at stake in our ongoing attempts at justifying this investment (the "aesthetic turn") or contesting it (the "political turn"). Were the praise-songs of "oppositionality," which once (a la Lowe, Chambers, Scott) dominated our field, simply the epiphenomena of a strategy of containment through which postcolonial studies was bound to a certain vision of "complexity" at odds with the anti-colonial, and unrepentantly non-literary, dynamics of a work like Orientalism, so that its truly radical (and, first and foremost, anti-Zionist) politics could be rendered palatable to an Anglo-American academic audience ever in search of a specious newness but intent on preserving the old, bourgeois order upon which literary studies, and the affect that so intimately attaches to it, has always, for better and for worse, depended? -- Francophone Postcolonial Studies Francophone Postcolonial Studies Bongie's review is alarmingly accurate. I do indeed accept 'literature as [my] chosen and delimited field of study' (though I try to see that field as part of a broader history). And he is entirely accurate in saying that I see the subversions offered by nineteenth-century literature as largely falling short of 'true resistance'... Of course the literature of the nineteenth century is racist according to our modern definitions; but racism is so vast and insidious a phenomenon that it is not in itself analytically useful and requires careful historical nuancing. In any case, although I am most interested in an approach that combines aesthetic and political concerns, and would regret such a rigid separation as Bongie appears to think necessary, I also differ from him in my belief in a supple and many-voiced criticism that does not need to dictate one single mode of textual analysis. -- Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies In this elegant, lucid, and original study of four 'exotic' works by Chateaubriand, Hugo, Flaubert, and Segalen, Jennifer Yee turns her back on Edward Said's negative depiction of nineteenth-century Orientalism in order to read her chosen texts from a post-colonialist perspective... Impressive and admirably comparative. -- French Studies French Studies