Author Description

In the course of the nineteenth century France built up a colonial empire second only to Britain's. The literary tradition in which it dealt with its colonial 'Other' is frequently understood in terms borrowed from Edward Said's description of Orientalism as both a Western projection and a 'will to govern' over the Orient. However, some exotic literature eludes such simple categorisation, offering glimpses of colonial resistance, a critique of imperialist hegemony, or a blurring of the boundaries between the Self and the Other. In this new study, Yee examines the ways in which the imperialist enterprise is subverted in the metropolitan literature of this period through derailed case studies of key works by Chateaubriand, Hugo, Flaubert and Segalen. Book jacket.