Orientalist Poetics: The Islamic Middle East in Nineteenth-Century English and French Poetry (review)

Abstract

Emily A. Haddad's study of the influence of orientalism on European poetics is a timely reminder of the long-standing tendency of the West to stereotype the Islamic Middle East. In this case, the stereotypes are seen to have what may be an unexpected effect: In Orientalist Poetics:The Islamic Middle East in Nineteenth-Century English and French Poetry, Haddad argues that orientalism was essential to English and French poetic developments through the nineteenth century. Perceived by European orientalists as entirely nonrepresentational, Islamic art was a stimulus to consideration of alternatives to a mimetic poetics. Furthermore, since it was inaccessible to empirical verification, the Orient as a subject was a site for destabilization of the convention of mimesis. Most significantly, the Islamic Middle East was seen by nineteenth-century European poets as "ontologically unnatural" (2002, 9) in environment, morality, and spirituality, thus serving as an ideal subject for poetry whose makers were exploring the role of nature as poetry's one best subject and its point of origin. In short, as model and source, the Orient and orientalism provided the opportunity for poetic experimentation which culminated in a revolutionary aesthetics: "Nineteenth-century poetics' evolution [End Page 180] towards a stance of art for art's sake owes both its origin and its progression in large part to . . . the Orient's supposedly inherent artfulness . . ." (10).