Julia Kuehn

The University of Hong Kong | HKU · School of English

The article thinks about issues of spatiality in Hong Kong, and the use of actual and figurative spaces during the Covid pandemic and in the context of face-to-face, online and mixed-mode teaching. Hong Kong is, perhaps, a unique case in this pandemic in so far as the timeline has to be pushed back into the autumn of 2019 as social unrest in Hong K...

This article analyzes what it means to be a hero or heroine in the world of William Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair. It argues that Thackeray offers a new and modern vision of heroism, one that is ordinary and canny rather than the result of a privileged birth or physical strength; one that leads the male and female protagonists of Vanity Fair from t...

Analysing Albert Smith’s and Charley Dickens’s 1858 and 1860 trips to the sites of the Second Anglo-Chinese War, the article suggests that the experience of war, especially of wars fought abroad, is characterised by affective unease and epistemological breakdowns. Smith and Dickens enact war tourism in Hong Kong, Canton and Shanghai as they perform...

While critics are in agreement when it comes to England’s and especially Thackeray’s influence on Fontane, no study has shown how much Frau Jenny Treibel (1892) is inspired by Vanity Fair (1848), particularly when it comes to the discourses of money and marriage. Several decades lie between the novels, as do different socio-cultural and political c...

The article situates David Copperfield in the tradition of Bildung and the Bildungsroman. It argues, against Franco Moretti, that the English novel is not a straightforward fairytale which ends in closure, the just distribution of punishments and rewards, and the protagonist’s blissful integration into a legitimate larger social order. Rather, it s...

This article scrutinizes the relationship between Eliot and German writer Fanny Lewald. Lewald had met Lewes in London in 1850, so Lewes introduced Marian Evans to Lewald in Berlin in 1854?55. Here, the women discovered a common interest in Spinoza, German biblical scholarship, and Goethe, but also the form of the contemporary novel. The article su...

As many places around the world confront issues of globalization, migration and postcoloniality, travel writing has become a serious genre of study, reflecting some of the greatest concerns of our time. Encompassing forms as diverse as field journals, investigative reports, guidebooks, memoirs, comic sketches and lyrical reveries; travel writing is...

This essay examines the concept of a “colonial cosmopolitanism”, a contradiction in terms, but a combination that was commonly invoked in the Victorian era. Over the past decade, the concept of “cosmopolitanism” has been appropriated for studies of the Victorian novel, on the one hand, and analyses of Grand Tour and modern(ist) city travelogues, on...

Ever since the 1990s, the term ‘cosmopolitanism’ has been reappearing as a critical concept; more precisely, as a ‘new cosmopolitanism’ that is specific to the historical conditions of late twentieth-century/twenty-first-century globalization.1 Inaugurated in criticism by, among others, Martha Nussbaum, Ulrich Beck, Anthony Appiah, Pheng Cheah, Bru...

This collection focuses attention on theoretical approaches to travel writing, with the aim to advance the discourse. Internationally renowned, as well as emerging, scholars establish a critical milieu for travel writing studies, as well as offer a set of exemplars in the application of theory to travel writing.

Many well-known male writers produced fictions about colonial spaces and discussed the advantages of realism over romance, and vice versa, in the ‘art of fiction’ debate of the 1880s; but how did female writers contribute to colonial fiction? This volume links fictional, non-fictional and pictorial representations of a colonial otherness with the...

This book maps the epistemological concerns of exoticism and of difference – self and other, home and away, familiarity and strangeness – onto the representational modes of realism and romance. The author focuses exclusively on female novelists, travel writers and painters of the turn-of-the-century exotic, and especially on neglected authors of ac...

As China rose to its position of global superpower, Chinese groups in the West watched with anticipation and trepidation. In this volume, international scholars examine how artists, writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals from the Chinese diaspora represented this new China to global audiences. The chapters, often personal in nature, focus on the ne...

This essay offers an overview of scholarly research conducted on late-Victorian bestselling author Marie Corelli over the past few decades. It first traces the various phases of scholarly interest in this popular writer: from biography to bibliography and ‘rediscovery’, to the ‘publishing phenomenon’ and zeitgeist criticism of the past 10 years. In...

On the surface, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness represents a perfect teaching text, offering much that is of interest in both form and content. Published in three parts as “The Heart of Darkness” in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1899, it was revised and brought out in one volume in 1902, without the definite article in the title. It remains on the shor...

This essay foregrounds the work of late nineteenth-century British painter Margaret Murray Cookesley, who may be largely forgotten today, but who in her day exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy and, it seems, also managed to sell her art to an interested public. What makes her oeuvre fascinating in the context of British Aestheticism is that sh...

“Orientalism is only a phase in the cult of the Exotic,” wrote French art historian Philippe Jullian in his study on the genre of painting that scholars have, since the nineteenth century, commonly referred to as Orientalist.1 In the most general sense Orientalist art, which was pioneered by the French and then developed by British and other Europe...

This essay foregrounds three encounters with China in English-language travelogues, written by British, Australian and American women between 1880 and 1920: the encounter with Chinese women, footbinding and miscegenation. Discussing issues of gender and race this essay draws on models from feminist theory, colonial discourse analysis and postcoloni...

Elisabeth Baumann was born in Warsaw in 1819 to a German mapmaker, Philip Adolph Baumann, and his German wife, Johanne Frederikke Reyer. Her early training took her to Berlin and, from 1838, to the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, a leading one in its day. According to Hans Christian Andersen, who would later write a biography of his friend Elisabeth, th...

Thirty years after its publication in 1978, a reconsideration of Edward Said’s Orientalism invites a shift from contextual and colonial discourse analysis towards a renewed attention to ambiguities of form and structure. The central point of interest of this special issue, ‘Re-Imagining the Victorian Orient’, hinges upon close readings of canonical...

The essay looks once more at the relationship between the two protagonists of George Eliot's final novel. It argues that rather than through issues of class, as scholars have conventionally argued, Gwendolen Harleth's interest in Daniel Deronda must be understood through the ethnic otherness he represents. He is, as the first chapter construes it s...

Transnation and translation refer to the “transnation zone” and the “translation zone.” These terms are loosely based on Mary Louise Pratt's “contact zone.” A term like “transculturation zone,” if in existence, would be preferable, as “transculturation” has been put to more convincing critical usage in debates outside colonial discourse analysis an...

This book brings together accounts of journeys and cross-cultural experiences by Chinese travelers in the late nineteenth century with those of more recent migrants and diasporic Chinese subjects in a number of global locations.

dqThis collection of essays is an important contribution to travel writing studies -- looking beyond the explicitly political questions of postcolonial and gender discourses, it considers the form, poetics, institutions and reception of travel writing in the history of empire and its aftermath. Starting from the premise that travel writing studies...

The book seeks to address how movements across cultures shape the different ways in which China and Chineseness have been imagined and represented since the beginning of the last century. In so doing, it aims to offer an overview of the debate about Chineseness as it has emerged in different global locations. © 2009 by Hong Kong University Press, H...

This chapter looks at women travelers in China between the late 1870s and the early 1920s. It specifically determines a first generation of women's travel in China exemplified in Isabella Bird's The Yangtze Valley and Beyond (1899) and Constance Gordon Cumming's Wanderings in China (1888). It also poses the question of whether their journeys served...

Writings of travelers have shaped ideas about an evolving China, while preconceived ideas about China also shaped the way they saw the country. A Century of Travels in China explores the impressions of these writers on various themes, from Chinese cities and landscapes to the work of Europeans abroad. From the time of the first Opium War to the dec...

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. © 2007 by Hong Kong University Press, HKU. All rights reserved.

This essay looks at a number of female travelers in China between 1880 and 1920, and analyzes how these women experience and describe the country and its people.1 However, rather than propose a synchronic study of history, I focus on a selection of encounters, or events, during that period. Foucault, in The Archaeology of Knowledge, deconstructs th...

When the Devil arrives in fin de siècle London in the form of the handsome and charming Prince Lucio Rimânez, his work promises to be easy. After all, in a world where science and materialism have replaced a belief in God, who will suspect Lucio of being Satan in disguise? Lucio sets his sights on Geoffrey Tempest, a starving novelist who has just...

The posthumous novel Open Confession to a Man from a Woman (1925) holds an unusual place in Marie Corelli's oeuvre: it presents a change of parameters in that it deconstructs the (Platonic) love ideal promoted elsewhere in her romantic fiction. This essay situates the novel in the context of Corelli's own failed love affair with the painter Arthur...

Glorious Vulgarity: Marie Corelli's Feminine Sublime in a Popular Context re-evaluates the work of Marie Corelli (1855-1924), the first English bestselling author of the one-volume novel. Until now critics have discussed Corelli in a socio-historical context, but have dismissed her novels as popular fiction not worthy of critical analysis. In contr...

Marie Corelli (1855-1924) war die erste englische Bestsellerautorin. Eine äusserst heterogene Leserschaft, die vom Küchenmädchen zur Königin reichte und Persönlichkeiten wie Königin Viktoria, Lord Tennyson, William Butler Yeats, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, William Gladstone und Henry Irving umfasste, wartete gespannt auf jeden ne...