Reviewed by: Late Victorian Orientalism: Representations of the East in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Art, and Culture from the Pre-Raphaelites to John La Farge ed. by Eleonora Sasso Barry Milligan (bio) Late Victorian Orientalism: Representations of the East in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Art, and Culture from the Pre-Raphaelites to John La Farge, edited by Eleonora Sasso; pp. xii + 227. London and New York: Anthem, 2020, £80.00, £25.00 ebook, $125.00, $40.00 ebook. The nine essays collected in Late Victorian Orientalism: Representations of the East in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Art, and Culture from the Pre-Raphaelites to John La Farge offer several riches, especially those that truly fall into the category delineated by the collection's title. Several chapters focus fruitfully on material that all would agree falls under the subject of Victorian culture, if not exclusively its late period. Chapters 1 through 4, for instance, fulfill the introduction's overview: "late Victorian writers emphasise the universal values of Eastern civilisations, as exemplified in the paintings and poems of William Holman Hunt, D. G. Rossetti, William Morris, Algernon Swinburne and John la Farge" (3). Chapter 5 then focuses upon the aesthetes, whereas chapters 6 and 7 treat, respectively, one of Rudyard Kipling's Anglo-Indian short stories and an anonymous travelogue from the early colonial days of Hong Kong. One of the book's most puzzling attributes, however, is the degree to which its title does not consistently match its contents. Indeed, even the subtitle hints at some bleeding around the edges, subsuming the American John La Farge under the banner of Victorian culture. Straining the category even further is the inclusion of essays on subjects that are neither Victorian nor nineteenth century, such as travel writing and French cinema from the latter half of the twentieth century (in chapters 8 and 9). Perhaps the most original offering here is Christopher Cowell's richly contextualized reading of an anonymous two-part travelogue treating Hong Kong's early colonial days, Hongkong and the Hongkonians (1841–2), the entire text of which is also included as an appendix—a welcome innovation, given Cowell's account of the scarcity of existing copies. Juxtaposing the travelogue against contemporaneous sketches, private journals, newspaper and book illustrations, and architectural plans, Cowell argues persuasively that "Hongkonians presented Hong Kong as the illusion of a new cultural space, of a relatively clean, prescriptive surface; as if in a stock-character novel in which the protagonists are carefully placed, described, encouraged to act according to predetermined concepts, texts, images of what ought to be." All of this leads to the conclusion "that, despite bordering China, initial geopolitical uncertainties meant that, for the British, Hong Kong was obliged to remain culturally indeterminate, at least for the moment" (154). [End Page 325] Among the other standout contributions is Florence Boos's "Empires and Scapegoats: The Pre-Raphaelites in the Near East" (chapter 2), which analyzes "the contrasting ways in which three British Pre-Raphaelite artists and writers, none of whom was directly involved in the military or diplomatic work of the empire, viewed the policies of imperial rule in a part of the world only one of them ever saw" (24). The analysis is most gripping with respect to the figure who actually did see the terrain, the painter William Holman Hunt, whose complicatedly obsessive visitations and revisitations of the East, both literal and imaginative, spanned his entire career. Boos persuasively concludes that Hunt was "the only British intellectual who was never quite able to reconcile his dogmatic Anglican Christianity and emotional attachment to the ideal of an 'enlightened' imperialism of John Bull with his fascination with other cultures in all their sensory, artistic, linguistic and ethnic complexity" (32). Boos is also compelling with respect to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, contending that, despite being the "largely apolitical elder son of an expatriate Italian revolutionary," Rossetti used his early poems to mock "the eternal recurrence of all empires: their plunder and arrogance," an angle that leads nicely into another standout essay, Eleonora Sasso's "Aja'ib, mutalibun and hur al-ayn: Rossetti, Morris, Swinburne and the Arabian Nights" (chapter 3) (40). Sasso argues that Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and William...
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Aug 21, 2023
Esther Leemann + 1
Open Access
