Re-examining nineteenth-century Easts: Gendered narratives of encounter (Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century)

Book info: Re-examining nineteenth-century Easts: Gendered narratives of encounter (Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century) (Hardcover, 304 pages) – Manchester University Press, 2026. Language: English.

Re-examining nineteenth-century Eastscontributes novel approaches to gendered and gendering fictions and travel writing in and of the cultural-geographical-ideological contexts surrounding nineteenth-century Easts. It examines underexplored stories of travel and narratives of encounter to reconsider the western allure of travelling to the Easts – from the Balkans to the Middle and Far East, through a range of diverse critical approaches. It discusses writers – travellers, novelists, and short-story writers – who authored texts based on their varied experiences in eastern lands. It also analyses how views of eastern places became a rich source of material for identity formations related to Empire but also discussions about masculinity and femininity at ‘home’. Editorial Reviews From the Back Cover

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.

About the Author

Claudia Capancioni is Professor of English Literature at Lincoln Bishop University, UK
Mariaconcetta Costantini is Professor of English Literature at G. d’Annunzio University, Chieti-Pescara, Italy
Julia Kuehn is Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands