The first book-length study of the oriental tale in England since 1908, Fabulous Orients is an original work of criticism which illustrates the centrality of narratives of and from the eastern territories of Turkey, Persia, China, and India in the formation of the novel and constructions of western identity in a culture on the threshold of empire.
Scheherazade’s Children gathers together leading scholars to explore the reverberations of the tales of the Arabian Nights across a startlingly wide and transnational range of cultural endeavors. The contributors, drawn from a wide array of disciplines, extend their inquiries into the book’s metamorphoses on stage and screen as well as in literature—from India to Japan, from Sanskrit mythology to British pantomime, from Baroque opera to puppet shows. Their highly original research illuminates little-known manifestations of the Nights, and provides unexpected contexts for understanding the book’s complex history. Polemical issues are thereby given unprecedented and enlightening interpretations. Organized under the rubrics of Translating, Engaging, and Staging, these essays view the Nights corpus as a uniquely accretive cultural bundle that absorbs the works upon which it has exerted influence. In this view, the Arabian Nights is a dynamic, living and breathing cross-cultural phenomenon that has left its mark on fields as disparate as the European novel and early Indian cinema. While scholarly, the writers’ approach is also lively and entertaining, and the book is richly illustrated with unusual materials to deliver a sparkling and highly original exploration of the Arabian Nights’ radiating influence on world literature, performance, and culture.
'Romanticism had its roots in fantasy and fed on myth'. So Roderick Cavaliero introduces the European Romantic obsession with the Orient. Cavaliero draws on a life-time's research in Romantic literature and introduces a rich cast of leading Romantic writers, artists, musicians and travellers, including Beckford, Byron, Shelley, Walter Scott, Pierre Loti, Thomas Moore, Rossini, Eugene Delacroix, Thackeray and Disraeli, and a host of other Romantics, who were drawn to the Orient in the 18th and 19th centuries. They luxuriate in its exotic sights, sounds, literature and, above all, in the prevailing mythology. Cavaliero analyses the Romantic vision where, as Byron writes, there are 'virgins soft as the roses they twine', but lays bare an underlying vision of cruelty and oppression, and of societies based on domestic or prisoner slavery - anathema to the 19th-century Romantic. The overarching myth was that of the Ottoman Empire, a huge and exotic superpower, an empire to rival Rome, a major threat to Europe, with an invincible military record ruled by a Sultan with absolute, even feckless, power of life and death over his subjects who lived to 'delight his senses'. But to the Romantics, fear of the absolute ruler was overlaid by frissons of oriental luxury. Thus the Ottoman Sultans were the heirs of the iconic Caliphate of Harun ar Rashid in the fabulous Arabian Nights Entertainments. Coleridge's dream of the Orient in Kubla Khan was not of the barbaric grandeur of the global Mongol empire but that of a 'stately pleasure dome in Xanadu' among incense-bearing trees and untroubled forests. Moore's Lalla Rookh was set in his visionary vale of Kashmir and is a love story in 'a land of kingfishers and golden orioles' with the backdrop of the mighty Moghul Empire. Scott was obsessed by the chivalry of the Crusades on both sides and Disraeli was fascinated by the interplay of the Abrahamic faiths and the hopes of peace in the Holy Land. Dualism runs through Romantic writing even when European realpolitik and modern nationalism are involved - as in the Greek revolt against Ottoman rule and the decline of Turkey as a great power. But above all for the Romantics the Orient remained mysterious and inviting. Cavaliero's Ottomania will delight all readers interested in tales of the exotic Orient, and the literature of the Romantic movement - a rich treasure-house of poets, novelists and travellers.
The authoritative account of the sectarian division that for centuries has shaped events in the Middle East and the Islamic world. In 632, soon after the prophet Muhammad died, a struggle broke out among his followers as to who would succeed him. The majority argued that the new leader of Islam should be elected by the community's elite. Others believed only members of Muhammad's family could lead. This dispute over whoshould guide Muslims, the appointed Caliph or the bloodline Imam, marks the origin of the Sunni-Shii split in Islam. Toby Matthiesen explores this hugely significant division from its origins to thepresent day. Moving chronologically, his book sheds light on the many ways that it has shaped the Islamic world, outlining how over the centuries Sunnism and Shiism became Islams two main branches, particularly after the Muslim Empires embraced sectarian identity. It reveals how colonial rule institutionalised divisions between Sunnism and Shiism both on the Indian subcontinent and in the greater Middle East, giving rise to pan-Islamic resistance and Sunni and Shii revivalism. It then focuseson the fall-out from the 1979 revolution in Iran and the US-led military intervention in Iraq. As Matthiesen shows, however, though Sunnism and Shiism have had a long and antagonistic history, mostMuslims have led lives characterised by confessional ambiguity and peaceful co-existence. Tensions arise when sectarian identity becomes linked to politics. Based on a synthesis of decades of scholarship in numerous languages, The Caliph and the Imam will become the standard text for readers looking for a deeper understanding of contemporary sectarian conflict and its historical roots.
Advocating a revised history of the eighteenth-century novel, Novel Cleopatras showcases the novel's origins in ancient mythology, its relation to epic narrative, and its connection to neoclassical print culture. Novel Cleopatras also rewrites the essential role of women writers in history who were typically underestimated as active participants of neoclassical culture, often excluded from the same schools that taught their brothers Greek and Latin. However, as author Nicole Horejsi reveals, a number of exceptional middle-class women were actually serious students of the classics. In order to dismiss the idea that women were completely marginalized as neoclassical writers, Horejsi takes up the character of Dido from ancient Greek mythology and her real-life counterpart Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt. Together, the legendary Dido and historical Cleopatra serve as figures for the conflation of myth and history. Horejsi contends that turning to the doomed queens who haunted the Roman imagination enabled eighteenth-century novelists to seize the productive overlap among the categories of history, romance, the novel, and even the epic.
This edited collection explores the complexities of Irish involvement in empire. Despite complaining regularly of treatment as a colony by England, Ireland nevertheless played a significant part in Britain’s imperialism, from its formative period in the late eighteenth century through to the decolonizing years of the early twentieth century. Framed by two key events of world history, the American Revolution and Indian Independence, this book examines Irish involvement in empire in several interlinked sections: through issues of migration and inhabitation; through literary and historical representations of empire; through Irish support for imperialism and involvement with resistance movements abroad; and through Irish participation in the extensive and intricate networks of empire. Informed by recent historiographical and theoretical perspectives, and including several detailed archival investigations, this volume offers an interdisciplinary and evolving view of a burgeoning field of research and will be of interest to scholars of Irish studies, imperial and postcolonial studies, history and literature.
Alf layla wa layla (known in English as A Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights) changed the world on a scale unrivalled by any other literary text. Inspired by a fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript, the appearance of Antoine Galland's twelve-volume Mille et Une Nuits in English translation (1704-1717), closely followed by the Grub Street English edition, drew the text into European circulation. Over the following three hundred years, a widely heterogeneous series of editions, compilations, translations, and variations circled the globe to reveal the absorption of The Arabian Nights into English, Continental, and global literatures, and its transformative return to modern Arabic literature, where it now enjoys a degree of prominence that it had never attained during the classical period. Beginning with a thorough introduction situating The Arabian Nights in its historical and cultural contexts-and offering a fresh examination of the text's multiple locations in the long history of modern Orientalism—this collection of essays by noted scholars from 'East', 'West', and in-between reassesses the influence of the Nights in Enlightenment and Romantic literature, as well as the text's vigorous after-life in the contemporary Arabic novel.
Though writers and readers have long agreed that travel does not only broaden the mind, but that it is also useful to report on such an experience, the question of what to report on and how has remained a matter of debate. To think of travel and travel writing as “foreign correspondence” is to apply, metaphorically, a phrase that has its own complex and overlapping history in journalism, politics, and international culture. The chapters of this volume focus on this notion, seen here as a dual problematic oscillating between the private and the public, whether as letters or other forms of writing sent from abroad. From Mandeville’s notorious Travels to fin de siècle Hispanic writing, this volume offers readings of accounts by early modern and more recent Lithuanian and Polish travellers, representations of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Ottoman Empire and India, Quixotic tropes in English travel writing about Spain, Galignani’s newspaper aesthetics, and several contributions on translation issues and the foreign as an idiom to be rendered in more familiar terms. The essays collected here thus all take foreign correspondence as their starting point, whether as letters or in other narrative forms. These texts are involved in complex webs of personal, political, social, and cultural negotiations between travellers and their hosts, as well as their presumed target audience; a key aspect of the rhetorics of foreign correspondence, as the chapters of this volume also go to show.
