Orientalism and British Women Writers

Abstract

A large portion of the literature written in Britain after 1770 was set in regions stretching from the Mediterranean to the Pacific Ocean – areas contested by various empires, including the British, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Russian empires. This global expansion brought with it new populations, languages, races, ethnicities, and cross-cultural contact between those in the metropole and those in the British colonies. In response, British writers from George Gordon, Lord Byron to Jane Austen integrated new cultural influences, literary elements, poetic and narrative forms, and globalized subjects and settings into their works of literature. The shifting repertoires of British literary, artistic, and aesthetic production created new cultural forms and led to the figuration of the Orient as an imaginative and hegemonic field of representation and cultural production. The rise of Orientalism also informed the development of other forms and genres of writing, including the gothic novel, the novel of sensibility, travel writing, and children’s literature. This essay overviews that terrain and offers suggestions for lucrative avenues of further research.