Hsu-Ming Teo

Macquarie University, English Dept, Faculty Member

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Hsu-Ming Teo teaches literature and creative writing at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her first novel Love and Vertigo (2000) won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award and was shortlisted for several other awards. It has been translated into Chinese, Thai, German and Italian. Her second novel Behind the Moon (2005) was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards. She is working on her third novel. Her academic publications include Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels (2012), the edited books The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction (2020, co-edited with Eric Murphy Selinger and Jayashree Kamble), The Popular Culture of Romantic Love in Australia (2017) and Cultural History in Australia (2003, co-edited with Richard White), as well as a wide range of articles on the history of travel, Orientalism, imperialism, fiction, and popular culture. She is an associate editor of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies and an editorial board member of the Journal of Australian Studies. Judging activities: Hsu-Ming served on the advisory panel of the Man Asian Literary Prize from 2007 to 2012 and judged the 2010 Man Asian Literary Prize. She judged the NSW Premier’s Literary Award in 2007, the NSW Premier’s History Prize in 2013 and 2017, and The Australian/Vogel Literary Award in 2020.

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Papers by Hsu-Ming Teo

Cultural Authenticity, the Family, and East Asian American Romance Novels

Although romance novels are overwhelmingly white where romantic protagonists and their communitie... more Although romance novels are overwhelmingly white where romantic protagonists and their communities are concerned (even if these societies are culturally diverse in reality), romance writers and readers of different ethnicities have challenged this white norm. Black American romance is a flourishing subgenre, albeit with its own problems of market limitations, and Hispanic romance publishing is a growing phenomenon. However, romance novels with East Asian protagonists are few and far between. This essay outlines briefly the rise of romance novels featuring East Asian protagonists (that is, protagonists mainly of Chinese, Japanese, or Korean background), and then explores how these novels constitute “Asianness.” Drawing on Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism and Stanley Fish’s configuration of strong and weak multiculturalism, I will consider how references to history, culture, and, above all, a certain notion of the oppressive Asian family are used to create a sense of authentic Asi...

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The Legacy of Weimar

The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction

by Eric Selinger, Hsu-Ming Teo, and Maria T Ramos-Garcia

The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction, 2020

https://openprairie.sdstate.edu/mlgs_book/1013/thumbnail.jp

Historical fiction and fictions of history

Rethinking History, Jun 1, 2011

... In a much-quoted piece that appeared in The Independent in 1999, Booker prize judge Natasha W... more ... In a much-quoted piece that appeared in The Independent in 1999, Booker prize judge Natasha Walter commented that &amp;amp;amp;amp;#x27;as we move ... and prejudice, and the production of sequels, before presenting a fascinating case study on the historical visions and revisions of Anne Boleyn. ...

Who am I without my trauma?: Confessions and confusions of a part-time Asian Australian

Future fusions and a taste for the past Literature, history and the imagination of Australianness

Australian Historical Studies, 2002

... Eleanor Hibbert (writing as Jean Plaidy and under a multitude of other pseudonyms), Catherine... more ... Eleanor Hibbert (writing as Jean Plaidy and under a multitude of other pseudonyms), Catherine Cookson, Catherine Gaskin and Colleen ... in history, most notably with Ellis Peters&#x27; medieval mysteries, Anne Perry&#x27;s Victorian thrillers, and, in Australia, Kerry Greenwood&#x27;s crime ...

$Research paper thumbnail of Fables of a fractured city$

Fables of a fractured city

9 page(s

The Romance novel

16 page(s

The Americanisation of romantic love in Australia

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Britishness and Australian popular fiction: from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries

21 page(s

The Britishness of Australian Popular Fiction

... Exploring the British World: Identity, Cultural Production, Institutions. The Britishness of ... more

An Imperial Affair: Portrait of an Australian Marriage

Australian Historical Studies, Sep 2, 2014

A book review of 'An Imperial affair : portrait of an Australian marriage' by John Rickar... more

This essay provides a historical evaluation of how scholars have employed Saidian Orientalism to ... more This essay provides a historical evaluation of how scholars have employed Saidian Orientalism to analyse the representation of Arabs, Muslims, the Middle East and North Africa in American popular culture from the revolutionary period to the present day. The scholarship examined here focuses on the American media, film, literature, material culture, world fairs, the expansion of the westward frontier, and consumer culture. I argue that whereas academics in the 1980s were concerned primarily with the extent to which European stereotypes of the Middle Eastern Arab/Muslim other proliferated in contemporary American popular culture and politics, this concern with negative stock images failed to provide a compelling and satisfactory explanation for how Americans actually engaged with ‘the Orient’ in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A historical approach to studying Orientalism in American culture has produced what I am calling post-Saidian analyses showing that American society has not merely been constructed in contradistinction to the Oriental other; rather, traditions of self-Orientalising have also played a vital part in creating multiple American selves.

Romancing the Raj: interracial relations in Anglo-Indian romance novels

History of Intellectual Culture, 2004

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Multiculturalism and the problem of multicultural histories: an overview of ethnic historiography

14 page(s

Constructions of gender and racial identities in interwar women’s travel writing

Limina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies, 1999

Behind the Moon

... For Thi Kim Uyen Truongthe best friend anyone could hope to haveand in memory of my late co... more

Love and Vertigo

"For the first time in my life, I saw my mother in relation to her family, and I didn't ... more "For the first time in my life, I saw my mother in relation to her family, and I didn't recognise her any more. These Singaporean roots of hers, this side of her - and possibly of me too - were unacceptable. I was determined not to belong, not to fit in, because I was Australian, and Mum ought to be Australian too. The tug of her roots, the blurring of her role from wife and mother to sister and aunt, angered me." On the eve of her mother's wake, Grace Tay flies to Singapore to join her father and brother and her mother's family. Here she explores her family history, looking for the answers to her mother's death. This beautiful and moving novel steps between Singapore, Malaysia and Australia, evoking the life, the traditions and tastes of a forceful Chinese family as well as the hardship, the cruelty and pain. Written in a fresh, contemporary voice tinged with biting humour, this is a story about resilience, a story about migration, but in many ways it is a story about parents' expectations for their children.296 page(s

Imperial Affairs: The British Empire and the Romantic Novel, 1890–1939

The British romantic novel became a distinct and bestselling genre during the mid-nineteenth cent... more The British romantic novel became a distinct and bestselling genre during the mid-nineteenth century, when Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) inspired other authors to write thrilling love stories published in triple-decker volumes that were sold at W.H. Smith railway bookstalls or circulated through Charles Mudie’s Select Library (Anderson 1974, p. 25). Women writers during this time, such as Yonge, Rhoda Broughton and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, popularised stories that featured the trials and tribulations of British heroes and heroines who fall in love, overcome various obstacles to their relationship, marry or are tragically parted by death (Anderson 1974). Most of their novels are set in Britain or, for more exotic fare, the Continent. However, from the 1890s onwards, they were joined by women writers from Britain’s colonies and dominions. This period was the zenith of British imperial power and, unsurprisingly, women writers used the colonies as exotic backdrops for their love stories. Romantic novels from the 1890s to the Second World War spread imperial fantasies of women who travelled to the colonies, hunted, worked as governesses, nurses and secretaries, managed households, ran viable plantations, fended off attacks by ‘the natives’, fell in love, married and made a place for themselves in the empire. Dreams of love and empire building bloomed in what I am calling women’s imperial romantic novels: love stories set in India, the white settler colonies and dominions, and Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.