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.