In this book, Jennifer Yee examines the ways in which the imperialist enterprise is subverted in the French nineteenth-century exotic literature through detailed case studies of key works by Chateaubriand, Hugo, Flaubert and Segalen.

In the course of the nineteenth century France built up a colonial empire second only to Britains. The literary tradition in which it dealt with its colonial 'Other' is frequently understood in terms of Edward Said's description of Orientalism as both a Western projection and a 'will to govern' over the Orient. There is, however, a body of works that eludes such a simple categorisation, offering glimpses of colonial resistance, of a critique of imperialist hegemony, or of a blurring of the boundaries between the Self and the Other. Some of the ways in which the imperialist enterprise is subverted in the metropolitan literature of this period are examined in this volume through detailed case studies of key works by Chateaubriand, Hugo, Flaubert and Segalen.

Decadence is seldom looked at in the context of colonialism, and yet its heyday in the 1880s and 1890s is directly contemporary with the expansion of France's modern colonial empire. Ever a slippery signifier, Decadence figures alternately as pro-colonial, anticolonial and apolitical. This edited volume gives a sense of the sheer range and diversity of intersections between colonialism and Decadence, from anticolonial anarchist writers to colonial discourse, from nineteenth-century women writers to our contemporary, Michel Houellebecq. Different chapters explore these intersections in the cultural imagination of dance, the novel, travel writing, historiographical theory, and literary networks. Decadence is often seen as an essentially metropolitan, urban movement, but this study identifies key spaces elsewhere, from fin-de-siecle Saigon to India in the heyday of French colonialism, from Byzantium to ancient Persia. Although the colonies were held up by some as an antidote to the threat of French decline, other writings reveal anxiety that the antidote might itself be a form of poison. Colonial contact might exacerbate degeneration, whether through cultural mixing or through the violence of colonial aggression itself. A profound anxiety about French identity and France's so-called mission civilisatrice is played out through the imagery, the style and the pose of Decadence.

Evolution in economy, technology and social institutions over time have given rise to boundaryless and Protean careers that promote mobility and self-direction in managing one’s career. This has led to the phenomenon of career change whereby individuals undertake a shift from one field of work to a completely different field of work. In career change research, career changers have been studied as a collective, singular group undergoing a similar change experience, which neglects individual differences that may contrast the experience of change from one changer to another. Furthermore, the emotional experience that accompanies a career change has been examined with a primary focus on the role of positive emotions, which overlooks the role of negative emotions in career change. Thus, this book sheds light on three key narratives of career change; Rejectors, Navigators and Seekers, that were identified in a phenomenological study of career change amongst Malaysian working adults. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 career changers across age, gender and ethnicity with a focus on how they made sense and meaning of their lived experience of career change within their environment and context. Each career change narrative was found to have different characteristics, motivations and behaviors respectively, which shaped their unique career change process. Negative emotions were also revealed as key drivers of the career change process, although each narrative expressed different types of negative emotions.Finally, the book also introduces an adaptive perspective to career development by way of the Adaptive Career Construal Model (ACCM) which was proposed based on the continuous bi-directional relationship between career decisions and career outcomes.

Nineteenth-century French Realism focuses on metropolitan France, with Paris as its undisputed heart. Through Jennifer Yee's close reading of the great novelists of the French realist and naturalist canon - Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant - The Colonial Comedy reveals that the colonies play a role at a distance even in the most apparently metropolitan texts. In what Edward Said called 'geographical notations' of race and imperialism the presence of the colonies off-stage is apparent as imported objects, colonial merchandise, and individuals whose colonial experience is transformative. Indeed, the realist novel registers the presence of the emerging global world-system through networks of importation, financial speculation, and immigration as well as direct colonial violence and power structures. The literature of the century responds to the last decades of French slavery, and direct colonialism (notably in Algeria), but also economic imperialism and the extension of French influence elsewhere. Far from imperialist triumphalism, in the realist novel exotic objects are portrayed as fake or mass-produced for the growing bourgeois market, while economic imperialism is associated with fraud and manipulation. The deliberate contrast of colonialism and exoticism within the metropolitan novel, and ironic distancing of colonial narratives, reveal the realist mode to be capable of questioning its own epistemological basis. The Colonial Comedy argues for the existence in the nineteenth century of a Critical Orientalism characterized by critique of its own discursive foundations. Using the tools of literary analysis within a materialist approach, The Colonial Comedy opens up the domestic Paris-Provinces axis to signifying chains pointing towards the colonial space.