Contested Boundaries: Domesticity, Spatiality, and Short Fiction in the South China Morning Post, 1904-07

This article examines selected short stories published in one of Hong Kong’s leading English newspapers, the South China Morning Post, 1904–7. These stories drew upon Victorian ideas of domesticity and space while engaging with, and at times critiquing, the colonial way of life. They described racial and spatial boundaries in colonial society, yet at the same time they drew attention to the instability of these divisions, thereby highlighting the difficulty of maintaining various boundaries—whether physical or metaphorical, inside or outside, private or public—in a colonial outpost in the Far East during the early twentieth century.