Eastern Figures – Orient and Empire in British Writing

Douglas Kerr is Professor in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Wilfred Owen's Voices, George Orwell, and co-editor, with Julia Kuehn, of A Century of Travels in China: Critical Essays on Travel Writing from the 1840s to the 1940s. He is also a founding co-editor of Critical Zone: A Forum of Chinese and Western Knowledge.

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