"Between Worlds": Reading Jeannette Lander's Jahrhundert der Herren as a Postcolonial Novel

This article examines Jeannette Lander's novel Jahrhundert der Herren in the context of postcolonial and travel literature. It offers a close reading of the text and traces the conflicting discourses the main protagonist, a young German woman, confronts in settling down in Sri Lanka. It argues that the protagonist is on the one hand able to critique the (neo)colonial masters' discourse, alluded to in the title of the novel, but that she also remains deeply implicated in it through her identification with the concepts of bourgeois subjectivity and progress, which ultimately hinder her from developing a dialogic, reciprocal relationship with Sri Lankan culture. (MS)