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 late nineteenth-century artistic concerns about representational conventions and possibilities. The author explores these texts and images through the postcolonial framework of ?exoticism?, arguing that the epistemological dilemma of a ?self? encountering an ?other? results in the interrelated predicament to find poetic modalities ? mimetic, realistic and documentary on the one hand; romantic, fantastic and picturesque on the other ? that befit an ?exotic? representation. Thus women writers did not only participate in the making of colonial fictions but also in the late nineteenth-century artistic debate about the nature of fiction.

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 academically under-researched genres such as the bestselling novel and the travelogue.