Douglas Kerr
Honorary Professor of English, University of Hong Kong
Honorary Research Fellow, Birkbeck College, University of London
Address: School of English
University of Hong Kong
Pokfulam Road
Hong Kong
Honorary Research Fellow, Birkbeck College, University of London
Address: School of English
University of Hong Kong
Pokfulam Road
Hong Kong
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Books by Douglas Kerr
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, charting the way his evolving views on (for example) 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, for example, 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: he remained Oriental Orwell to the end. In a way that anticipates our current debates about the imperial legacy, he struggled to come to terms with his own history.
REVIEWS
"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
"Douglas Kerr's thoughtful and thought-provoking engagement with British writing about Eastern peoples and places is a valuable addition to the critical literature that has responded to the challenge of Said's Orientalism. Through exemplary attentive close readings of writers from Kipling to Redmond O'Hanlon, while drawing on the resources of deeper historical reading, Kerr displays some of the governing tropes of the British imperial imagination. Eastern Figures avoids the programmatic and formulaic: it provides, instead, a continuously inventive re-visioning of the British encounter with 'the East'."
Robert Hampson, Professor of Modern Literature, Royal Holloway College, University of London
"In the aftermath of the era of European empires, readers can re-learn from Kerr why we might read the authors he invokes without the sense that their books have dated, or that the encounters they were troubled and excited by are any less compelling or relevant today."
Rajeev S. Patke, Associate Professor of English Literature, National University of Singapore
A “rich and impressive study”; “The facility of moving between nineteenth- and twentieth-century sources and the lucidity of his expository readings of often difficult texts suggests a lifetime of study and reflection.” “Eastern Figures is an ambitious tapestry, full of familiar texts resituated anew but also threaded with striking finds…. This book excels at bringing … passing details into meaningful discursive frameworks. It is strongly recommended.”
Roger Luckhurst, English Literature in Transition 1880-1920
“This book is an excellent interrogation of British writing … about Eastern people and places and allows the reader to re-learn how the encounters and conflicts between ‘East and West’ are just as compelling and relevant today.”
Herb Thompson, Journal of Contemporary Asia
“Douglas Kerr’s Eastern Figures reminds us why the Empire is interesting and, even more, why studying it remains critical today. And that Kerr does so in a volume as lean and shapely as this one is credit indeed, especially given the range of his coverage and his intensive treatment.” “The study’s credit remains its estimable focus: this is a literary history that stays committed foremost to the literary object. Thus Kerr’s approach, interdisciplinary though it is, sticks closely to literary texts and to attitudes towards empire that literary writing betrays.” “Kerr’s masterful study brings us close to the monument [of empire] and allows us to see its fissures. His extraordinary eye and his keen selections remind us why literary history is so crucial for understanding the age: literature captures the structures of feeling often before they are cemented as doxa.”
Priya Joshi, Victorian Studies
From the time of the first Opium War to the declaration of the People's Republic, China's history has been one of extraordinary change and stubborn continuities. At the same time, the country has beguiled, scared and puzzled people in the West. The Victorian public admired and imitated Chinese fashions, in furniture and design, gardens and clothing, while maintaining a generally negative idea of the Chinese empire as pagan, backward and cruel.
In the first half of the twentieth century, the fascination continued. Most foreigners were aware that revolutionary changes were taking place in Chinese politics and society, yet most still knew very little about the country. But what about those few people from the English-speaking world who had first-hand experience of the place? What did they have to say about the "real" China? To answer this question, we have to turn to the travel accounts and memoirs of people who went to see for themselves, during China's most traumatic century.
While 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.
Each volume has two sections: the first features original articles on a set of related topics by scholars from around the world, and the second includes review essays and translations chosen as manifestations of recent critical trends and debates in China.
This third volume begins with a section of powerful original essays entitled Locations, containing four essays of cultural and historical studies of Hong Kong, and then broadening out with two further essays on America as an "empire of immigrants", and on imagining the global future. The second section contains English translations of path-breaking work by Chinese scholars on Chinese nationalism, history writing, China's naval capabilities and foreign policy strategy.
Critical Zone will be valuable to international readers who have no direct linguistic access to Chinese scholarship and to Chinese readers who wish to be informed of critical and intellectual developments elsewhere. It will be of interest to academics, graduate students, and undergraduate students working in the humanities and social sciences."
"Volume 3 continues to present critical analyses of exceptional originality and depth. This issue also includes thought-provoking discussion of Hong Kong's distinctive identity, as well as its historical role in global exchange." Professor Catherine Belsey, Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University
"Critical Zone continues to be a unique and vital conduit of intellectual exchange and cross-cultural communication among scholars of the humanities in China and beyond." Professor Zhou Xiaoyi, Peking University
Wilfred Owen’s Voices was widely reviewed and remains the standard critical monograph.
“Kerr’s research promises to influence the way we read Owen for years to come. For admirers of Owen looking for exciting, fresh readings of the poetry and an intelligent, sensitive examination of the life, they need look no further than Douglas Kerr’s marvellous new book.” (JEGP)
“By the thoughtful and intelligent detailing of Wilfred Owen’s voices, Kerr establishes himself as an individual talent in the great tradition of Owen critics, and, more importantly, established Owen as a modernist writer whose extraordinary authority stems from more than his authentic death.” (The Review)
“Wilfred Owen’s Voices is an outstanding study. Kerr defines his aim: an investigation of the social determinants of a poet’s creativity. […] It is an admirable aim, defined with intellectual tact and successfully pursued throughout the book. Kerr writes a vigorous, elegant, and aphoristic prose that is refreshingly unlike the style of much contemporary criticism, and he brings to his study of Owen wide reading in English and European literature.” (Bernard Bergonzi, Heroes’ Twilight, 2nd edition)
Talks by Douglas Kerr
Articles by Douglas Kerr
KEYWORDS
Conrad – ‘The Brute’ – interpretation – Roland Barthes – reader response – allegory