Douglas Kerr – författare

Considers George Orwell's writing about the East, and the presence of the East in his writing.George Orwell was born in India and served in the Imperial Police in Burma as a young man. Orwell and Empire is a study of his writing about the East and the East in his writing. It argues that empire was central to his cultural identity and that his experience of colonial life was a crucial factor, in ways that have not been recognized, in shaping the writer he became. Orwell and Empire is about all his writings, fictional and non-fictional. It pays particular attention to work that derives directly from his Burmese years including the well-known narratives 'A Hanging' and 'Shooting an Elephant' and his first novel Burmese Days. It goes on to explore the theme of empire throughout his work, through to Nineteen Eighty-Four and beyond, and charts the way his evolving views on class, race, gender, and authority were shaped by his experience in the East and the Anglo-Indian attitudes he had inherited. Orwell's socialism and his hatred of authoritarianism grew out of his anti-imperialism as The Road to Wigan Pier makes explicit. But this was not a straightforward repudiation or a painless process. He understood that, 'it is very difficult to escape, culturally, from the class into which you have been born.' His whole career was a creative quarrel with himself and with his Anglo-Indian patrimony. In a way that anticipates current debates about the imperial legacy, he struggled to come to terms with his own history.

In this perceptive and original study of one of the most popular of English poets, Douglas Kerr has written the life of Wilfred Owen's language.The book explores the meaning in 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. The language in which Owen's extraordinary poems and letters are written was learned in and from these communities which shaped his short career. But there were times too when he hated each of them. As Douglas Kerr shows, much of the power of Owen's writing derives from his desire to transform the communities which formed him.Accessible and lucid, and informed by the insights of recent theory, Wilfred Owen's Voices throws important new light on the best-known of the English war poets, and on both the cultural history and intense personal drama to be read in his work.

From the early stories, to the great popular triumphs of the Sherlock Holmes tales and the Professor Challenger adventures, the ambitious historical fiction, the campaigns against injustice, and the Spiritualist writings of his later years, Conan Doyle produced a wealth of narratives. He had a worldwide reputation and was one of the most popular authors of the age. A critical study of the writings of Arthur Conan Doyle and a cultural biography, this is a book for students of literary and cultural history, and Conan Doyle enthusiasts. It is a full account of all of his writing, and an investigation of the role of the author as he practised it, as witness, critic, and interpreter of his times.His work was widely read and enjoyed, but it is far from being a simple endorsement of the masculine, imperialist, bourgeois, scientific world he so often portrayed.The subject of this study is what Conan Doyle knew--the knowledge of his own culture, its institutions and values and ways of life, its beliefs and anxieties, which is created and shared by his writing. The book is organized according to a number of cultural domains--sport, medicine, science, law and order, army and empire, and the spiritual life. At a time when literature had become a profession, in a society where literacy was more widespread than ever before or since, Conan Doyle emerges as a maker of culture, offering his readers an image of themselves, their past and their future.

From the early stories, to the great popular triumphs of the Sherlock Holmes tales and the Professor Challenger adventures, the ambitious historical fiction, the campaigns against injustice, and the Spiritualist writings of his later years, Conan Doyle produced a wealth of narratives. He had a worldwide reputation and was one of the most popular authors of the age. A critical study of the writings of Arthur Conan Doyle and a cultural biography, this is a book for students of literary and cultural history, and Conan Doyle enthusiasts. It is a full account of all of his writing, and an investigation of the role of the author as he practised it, as witness, critic, and interpreter of his times. His work was widely read and enjoyed, but it is far from being a simple endorsement of the masculine, imperialist, bourgeois, scientific world he so often portrayed.The subject of this study is what Conan Doyle knew - the knowledge of his own culture, its institutions and values and ways of life, its beliefs and anxieties, which is created and shared by his writing. The book is organized according to a number of cultural domains - sport, medicine, science, law and order, army and empire, and the spiritual life. At a time when literature had become a profession, in a society where literacy was more widespread than ever before or since, Conan Doyle emerges as a maker of culture, offering his readers an image of themselves, their past and their future.

A fresh account of the development and achievement of the novelist and essayist who became Britain's greatest political writer of modern times. George Orwell (1903-1950) is one of the most important, admired, and controversial British writers of modern times. This new study examines his writing - the novels, journalism, essays and polemics - by looking at the context and development of his passionately held views, and at the genres, representations and narratives in which they found expression. Douglas Kerr gives an account of Orwell's whole writing career, from its awkward beginnings in Down and Out in Paris and London to the ambiguous triumphs of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, tracing its relation to four contexts - the East, England, Europe, and the nightmare police-state of Oceania. In particular he argues for the importance of Orwell's youthful service in the colonial police in Burma, and for the way his experience of the East and of what he called 'the dirty work of empire' shaped the writer's emerging understanding of oppression and freedom, inequality and justice.

A fresh account of the development and achievement of the novelist and essayist who became Britain's greatest political writer of modern times. George Orwell (1903-1950) is one of the most important, admired, and controversial British writers of modern times. This new study examines his writing - the novels, journalism, essays and polemics - by looking at the context and development of his passionately held views, and at the genres, representations and narratives in which they found expression. Douglas Kerr gives an account of Orwell's whole writing career, from its awkward beginnings in Down and Out in Paris and London to the ambiguous triumphs of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, tracing its relation to four contexts - the East, England, Europe, and the nightmare police-state of Oceania. In particular he argues for the importance of Orwell's youthful service in the colonial police in Burma, and for the way his experience of the East and of what he called 'the dirty work of empire' shaped the writer's emerging understanding of oppression and freedom, inequality and justice.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s visit to Egypt in 1895–96 included a trip up the Nile from Cairo to Wadi Halfa in a Cook’s steamer, which he documents in The Nile Journal, published here for the first time. His trip also included a month reporting on Kitchener’s expeditionary army’s march south to confront the ‘Dervish’ forces of the Khalifa. Both experiences informed the novella The Tragedy of the Korosko, a tale of abduction and rescue on the Sudanese frontier, published serially in the Strand in 1897 and in book form in 1898. This edition is the first scholarly treatment of this important book, a key text for the understanding of Conan Doyle’s imperialism.A decade later saw the staging of The Fires of Fate, his dramatisation of the tale, with significant changes to characters and story. This play had a modest success on the stage, but has never appeared in print. Juxtaposing these two works highlights Conan Doyle’s mastery of two forms of storytelling, while the differences between the two illustrate his evolving views and practices in the middle years of his literary career.

Critical Zone is an established series in cultural and literary studies jointly published by the Hong Kong University Press and Nanjing University Press. This is the third number. Based in Hong Kong and mainland China, Critical Zone aims to bring together scholars around the world and to improve cross-cultural and cross-regional understanding.

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.

This book is a new series in cultural and literary studies jointly published by the Hong Kong University Press and Nanjing University Press. Based in Hong Kong and mainland China, Critical Zone aims to bring together scholars around the world and to improve cross-cultural and cross-regional understanding.

The series aims to improve understanding across cultures, traditions, discourses, and disciplines, and to produce international critical knowledge.

This book represents the work of expert scholars, it is also accessible to non-specialists with an interest in travel writing and China, and care has been taken to explain the critical terms and ideas deployed in the essays from recent scholarship of the travel genre.