O rientalism, Poetry and Prose

Abstract

The expansion of the British Empire to India and the accounts of British travellers, along with the translation of Alf Layla wa Lala , or what is better known as The Arabian Nights , and of several other Persian and Arabic literary prose and verse works, led to the emergence of Romantic Orientalism as a popular genre during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, interest in the Orient, a region then including large parts of Asia (Arabia, Persia, and India), North Africa, and eastern regions of Europe (Greece, Albania, and Turkey), extends as far back as 500 BC, when the Phoenicians transmitted Oriental culture to the Continent and connected Byblos, Sidon, and Tyre along the coast of Lebanon to ports scattered along the Mediterranean and even beyond to the ‘Lead Islands’ south of England in the Atlantic. The Phoenicians passed on to the Greeks the Siniatic alphabet, which later became the basis of all European alphabets (Hitti 1964: 70–72). From around 600 BC until the Roman conquest of England in 43 BC, the Celts dominated Europe, but ‘the customs of the Celtic race, its tribal organizations, its tales and its traditions all embody Oriental ideas brought by Irish travellers from the [then] most distant East’ (Mansoor 1944: 15). At the time, the Orient flourished mainly in philosophy, literature, and sciences. However, the conversion of Europe to Christianity early in the fourth century and the rise of Islam in Arabia in the seventh century changed the courses of political, religious, and cultural history in the East and on the Continent. Irish, British, and Continental theologians and scholars during the Roman era and the Middle Ages flocked to the Orient seeking spiritual and intellectual knowledge and wisdom, especially after Constantine declared Christianity a legal religion of the Roman Empire by the Edict of Milan (313), St Patrick converted Ireland in the middle of the fifth century, and St Augustine converted England by the end of the sixth century. Oriental cultures found their way into British prose and poetry and survived throughout the Anglo‐Saxon and medieval periods in chronicles, histories, letters, tales, masques, travelogues, and religious poetry. The spread of Islam early in the seventh century further pressed Oriental matter into European minds, and the Arabized’ cities of Toledo and Cordoba in Spain became centres of Oriental culture and education in Europe. The sixteenth century was notable for the number of dramas (tragedies and comedies) dealing with Oriental matter; and the seventeenth century, for the increasing number of travelogues and histories about the Orient. Alexander Ross published a version of the Koran in 1649, and Sir Paul Rycaut published The Present State of the Ottoman Empire in 1668. Both works proved to be vital references about the Orient in the upcoming ages, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even more significant than the above mentioned works were the Embassy Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu from Constantinople (1717–18), The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment (1712), Thomas Shaw's Travels (1738), Richard Pococke's Description of the East (1743, 1745), George Sale's translation of the Koran (1735), Samuel Johnson's Rasselas (1759), William Beckford's Vathek (1786), and Sir William Jones's Poems, Chiefly Translated from Asiatic Languages (1772). Those works accompanied a British fashionable taste for Oriental matter and generated a diversity of literary subgenres under Romantic Orientalism, including the Oriental tale in poetry and prose, travel literature (guide and travel books and letters), history, essay, poetry (lyrical, narrative, and dramatic), novel (Gothic and sentimental), and dramas (tragedy, comedy, melodrama, and pantomime). Romantic Orientalism, then, became part of the larger movement of British Romanticism, which was further enhanced by Napoleon's invasion of Egypt (1798–9) and Greece's War of Independence (1821–8). To Romantic travellers, scholars, and men of letters the Orient constituted a distant world which conveniently suited their search for exotic and sublime experiences.