Eastern Figures – Orient and Empire in British Writing

This fine study represents a rich distillation of Douglas Kerr's career-long study of the modalities of the East: the crowd, the implacable face, the contact zone. Readings of Kipling, Forster and Orwell, but also of less familiar writers such as Auden, Maud Diver, and Alfred Russel Wallace carefully interrogate settled ideas of the Orient as predictable and unfissured, and maintain a sustained literary focus throughout. -- Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English, Oxford University