Victor Segalen and the Aesthetics of Diversity
Journeys between Cultures
Charles Forsdick
Price: £69.00 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-816014-4
Publication date: 9 November 2000
256 pages, 216x138 mm
A sample of this book is available in PDF format
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| Reviews |
| - '
This is the first extensive study of Segalen's work to appear in English, and is inaugural in more senses than one: Charles Forsdick has produced an indispensable guide to the état présent
of Segalen studies ... His painstaking depiction of Segalen's response to what he saw as the decline of cultural diversity, due to the forces of Western colonization, results in a generously
informative work that offers a whole new archive of material for future Segalen critics.
' - Modern Language Review
- '... impressive and timely study ... incisive portrait.' - Edward Hughes, Times Literary Supplement
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| Description | | - asserts the originality of Segalen's notion of exoticism whilst offering the first comprehensive study of the genesis of his aesthetics.
- Segalen's work is becoming increasingly established as a point of reference in a range of fields.
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From his premature death in 1919 until the final decades of the twentieth century, the French traveller, author, and naval doctor Victor Segalen remained relatively obscure, his extensive work on exoticism largely unavailable. With the appearance of the Complete Works
in 1995, the dramatic scope and wide-ranging implications of his reflections on diversity were at last fully apparent.
Segalen's understanding of the exotic is radically different from that of his colonial contemporaries. His exoticism - or Aesthetics of Diversity - focuses on the instability of contact between different cultures and represents a unique response to the decline of diversity triggered by colonialism and Westernization. Recent attention to Segalen in a variety of fields - post-modern sociology,
post-colonialism, literary criticism, anthropology - indicates his role as a precursory theorist of the exotic whose work is of increasing
contemporary relevance. At a moment when exoticism is rapidly emerging as a term of critical currency, this study of the genesis of Segalen's aesthetics is a timely contribution to work in this area.
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Readership: The book will attract readers with an interest in travel literature, China and Polynesia, and the relationship between Europe and the Orient; it is aimed in particular at academics, scholars and research students in French studies, literary studies, cultural studies, anthropology, and post-colonial criticism.
| Contents |
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Victor Segalen and the Aesthetics of Diversity
1.
Defining the Exotic: Exotcism as an Approach to Radical Diversity
2.
Exoticism and Empire: Colonial Literature and Post-Colonial Critique
3.
Polynesia and Difference
4.
China and Alterity
5.
Towards a New Practice of Exoticism
Conclusion
Select Bibliography
Index
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| Authors, editors,
and contributors |
Charles Forsdick, Lecturer in French, University of Glasgow
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