This chapter moves [...] to the Indian subcontinent and into the realm of popular writing. The novels under investigation are women's best-selling novels, set in colonial India. In critical discourse, these novels are generically referred to as ‘Anglo-Indian fiction’, or, to signal more specifically their indebtedness to everyday and romantic issues, ‘Anglo-Indian domestic novels’ or ‘Indian Romances’. 1 Anglo-Indian popular fiction is an important genre in the context of colonial literature and exotic discourse, if in retrospect a rather short-lived phenomenon. These novels ‘began to appear in the 1880s,’ as Alison Sainsbury writes, ‘made a strong showing through the 1920s, began to die out in the 1930s, and had mostly disappeared by the 1940s, along with direct British rule of India’. 2 It was women ‘of the Anglo-Indian community, official, civilian, or military’ who were mostly, but not exclusively, the authors of these novels. 3 The names associated with the genre include Bithia Mary Croker, Ethel M. Dell, Maud Diver, Alice Eustace, Hilda Caroline Gregg (writing as Sydney C. Grier), Fanny E. F. Penny, Alice Perrin, E. W. Savi and Flora Annie Steel. This list, however, is by no means exhaustive and includes only the most prolific and popular writers of the genre; there were dozens of other women, some of whom are discussed in this chapter, who produced many hundreds of novels and short stories that are only gradually being rediscovered.
and Chapter 7, which "focuses on [...] popular novels. It locates the representation of the desert region in the ‘desert romances’ of the early twentieth century—that is, that particular genre of fiction which sets its stories in the Algerian and Egyptian parts of the Sahara desert."
Unfortunately I have not been able to access a copy so I don't know exactly which authors/works are discussed but I have taken some guesses based on the names mentioned above, the bibliography provided at the end of the pdf sample available from Taylor & Francis, and authors who were already tagged in the database. I also found a review by Daný van Dam in Women's Writing 21.2 (2014) which states that:
In the chapters on Anglo-Indian fiction and desert romances, Kuehn shows the tension visible even in romance novels at this time when dealing with racial others in a feminine discourse of exoticism. Anglo-Indian fiction, popular from the 1880s until about the 1930s, as Kuehn notes, explores “the various possibilities for representing interracial desire” (64). However, in spite of being romances, few of these novels actually offered solutions and narrative closure, especially when it came to the position of mixed-race children. Desert romances, mostly published around the 1920s, may create “the impression that there is a conversation with alterity”, but, ultimately, Kuehn states, the “communication in exoticism between self and other, between the west and the foreign, is all too often a European monologue rather than a dialogue” (153). These chapters’ intriguing focus on the relation between exoticism and gendered constructions of art—and artists—by both the audience and the artists themselves could have been made more prominent throughout the book to provide a more unified structure.
See Chapter 3, for which this is the abstract:
and Chapter 7, which "focuses on [...] popular novels. It locates the representation of the desert region in the ‘desert romances’ of the early twentieth century—that is, that particular genre of fiction which sets its stories in the Algerian and Egyptian parts of the Sahara desert."
Unfortunately I have not been able to access a copy so I don't know exactly which authors/works are discussed but I have taken some guesses based on the names mentioned above, the bibliography provided at the end of the pdf sample available from Taylor & Francis, and authors who were already tagged in the database. I also found a review by Daný van Dam in Women's Writing 21.2 (2014) which states that: