"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,

"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 clos

"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 re

Douglas Kerr is Professor in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Wilfred Owen's Voices, George Orwell, and editor, with Julia Kuehn, of A Century of Travels in China Critical Essays on Travel Writing from the 1840s to the 1940s. He is also a founding editor of Critical Zone A Forum of Chinese and Western Knowledge.