Romantic Orientalism Research Articles

The Talisman, The Book of Saladin, and Reluctant Orientalism

The renowned writer of historical novels Walter Scott’s representations of historical figures reach beyond his country of birth. As a man of literature, he imagines the beyond. The Talisman is a product of such excess, but it is not the first in Europe depicting the leader of the Ayyubids Saladin who conquered Jerusalem and settled within the consciousness of the West as a result. Far before romantic orientalism during the nineteenth century, Renaissance was already interested in oriental exoticism. Saladin appeared in Dante’s Inferno, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and Voltaire’s Zaire in varying but positive forms. Scott continued this tradition and created a fictional Saladin who ‘was’ an oriental despot with European virtues. Even though Tariq Ali penned The Book of Saladin one hundred and seventy-three years later, Saladin has always remained a popular fictional figure. He alternates the modernist and orientalist narrations of the East with postcolonial and postmodernist literary techniques, but he falls into the same modernist trap Scott had fallen into while creating an unusual Eastern character for European readers. Their common reluctant orientalism links these two narrations of Saladin inextricably as Eurocentrism haunts their non-Eurocentric depictions ironically. By using reluctant orientalism as a term for the first time and comparing Scott and Ali contrary to the accustomed analyses, this study does more than filling a positivist lacuna. It delays the Absolute meanings of Scott and Ali.

Media, Redemption, and Myth Superscription in Zhang Yimou’s Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles

This article analyzes scenes of media and redemption in Zhang Yimou’s 张艺谋 film Qianli zou danqi 千里走单骑 ( Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles , 2005) as a critique of Romantic Orientalism. Whereas in Western Romantic poetry, the themes of retreating to nature and journeying abroad are strengthened by imagining the Orient and appropriating the local voice, Riding Alone negates that motif by depicting the divided subjectivities of Kenichi, a historian of Oriental Art at Tokyo University, and his failed redemption during his journey to China. The film offers his father Takata’s alternative journey, which involves the foreign traveler losing his subject position before asserting his own, leading to the revival of the Lord Guan story. Much of the historical myth-making of Lord Guan in Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian religious practices involves a reinvention of a cultural tradition as a response to foreign threat; all share the features of what Prasenjit Duara calls “the apotheosization of a hero and his role as guardian” in a process of the “superscription of symbols.” By contrast, Riding Alone is secular and forward-thinking while reenacting several meanings of the Lord Guan myth such as repentance, sacrifice, redemption, and guardianship. The film interpolates the Japanese into a new “Oriental” subject position that has to lose its Western Orientalism as well as the negative impact of industrialism while retaining democratic subjectivity, and the Chinese into a new democratic subject position that maintains autonomy.Myth Superscription in Zhang Yimou’s Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles

LETITIA E. LANDON AND ISABELLA BIRD: FEMALE PERSPECTIVES OF ASIA IN THE VICTORIAN TEXT

British representations of Asia became an increasingly common cultural and literary phenomenon in the nineteenth century, with works of fiction and non-fiction replete with various depictions of life in the East flooding the literary marketplace. With Romantic Orientalism firmly established as a literary trope, the exoticism of the East proved highly attractive as a source of inspiration for male poets such as Lord Byron, Robert Southey, and Thomas Moore, and many eagerly took up Byron's advice to 'stick to the East [as] the public are orientalizing.' British colonial expansion in countries like India, China and Malaya in the second half of the nineteenth century especially resulted in a rise in the number of female travellers and expatriates tapping into this lucrative market for Orientalist fiction and non-fiction, providing their own accounts of Eastern landscapes, cultures, and peoples that rivalled those of earlier, predominantly male. voices. This essay examines the depictions of Asia in the writings of two prominent Victorian female authors, the poet and short story writer, Letitia Elizabeth Landon (more popularly known as LEL), who published in the 1830s, and Isabella Bird, the famed explorer and first woman fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, who published from 1856 until 1901. My discussion will juxtapose Landon's portrayal of China and Malaya in two poems, namely 'Macao' (1833) and 'Pulo Penang' (1836), with Bird's accounts of China and Malaya in her travelogue The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither (1883).

Fictional Footnotes, Romantic Orientalism, and the Remediated Novel: Elizabeth Hamilton's Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah

Elizabeth Hamilton's Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796) is a heavily-annotated orientalist epistolary novel. Many of the novel's footnotes, which offer definitions of Hindi terms or refer to works of orientalist scholarship, interrupt the letters’ first sentences. Through this intersection of epistolary address with the footnotes’ direct address to the reader, Hamilton establishes the conceptual extremes of hypermediacy and immediacy that characterize this novel's representative strategies. Hamilton's notes and core text are linked through these structures of address as well as duplicated plots of education: as the eponymous Rajah learns about British culture in the main text, the British reader learns about Hindu culture in the notes. I identify these duplicated plots as the origin of this novel's much-discussed generic hybridity. Hamilton's novel suggests that mediation offers, first, a way to reassess the hybrid novelistic forms of the Romantic period and, secondly, a new approach to literary orientalism.

Thomas Moore and the Russian Literature of the 1820-1830 Years

The article deals firstly with the studying of Thomas Moore creative power in the context of the development tendencies of Russia literature in 1820-1830-years. It was also noted the Irish Melodies influence on the appearance or the Irish theme in the country periodicals and intensification of free-thinking motives in Russia poetry. There were also disclosed reasons of the eastern tale «Lalla Rouch» popularity in Russia which were corresponding to the blossoming of the Russian romantic orientalism and to the tendencies of the romantic poets investigation of the national originality by means of taking into account folk-lore and ethnography. In spite of the fact that the majority of early Thomas Moore translations into Russian were prosaic and were not done from the original works but from French middle translations the poetic works of the English author has become widely famous in Russia which can be proved by the appearance of reminiscences and traditions of Thomas Moore creative work in Russia romantic literature and including T. Moore poetry into the programme of educational establishments. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n2s4p105

Invasion and Retreat: Gothic Representations of the Oriental Other in Byron’s The Giaour

YIN YUAN Invasion and Retreat: Gothic Representations ofthe Oriental Other in Byron’s The Giaour T he giaour is byron’s sustained and deeply sensitive meditation on the politics of oriental representation. To this extent, the poem’s concerns with the (largely textualized) East manifest not only at the level of content, but also register as a distinct problem of form. Thus the conspicu­ ous performativity of The Giaour, which flaunts its formal idiosyncrasies through a self-deconstructive narrative logic that suggests that its author cares not just about the story he is telling, but more significantly, the man­ ner in which he tells it. Yet, where treatments of the poem’s Romantic orientalism have ventured beyond the basic materialist framework to take up issues of form, they have tended to reiterate established aesthetic read­ ings simply by relocating them within the context of imperialism.1 Eric i. For instance, Nigel Leask reads The Giaours multiply-framed narrative, eloquently ex­ plicated byjerome McGann and Robert Gleckner, as “the formal equivalent ofcultural deg­ radation which is the poem’s theme.” Following McGann and Marjorie Levinson, Leask traces this self-conscious narrative framing to a similar process of redaction in Samuel Rog­ ers’s The Voyage of Columbus, but goes on to also unpack the thematic connections between the two poems in order to highlight the Giaour’s ambivalent heroism. See Leask, British Ro­ mantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 30, 33, 13. My paper owes a considerable debt to Leask’s insightful and comprehen­ sive formulation ofByron’s anxieties toward his own “ ‘poetical policy’ oforientalism,” but I hope to extend the implications of Leask’s argument by examining at greater length the for­ mal complexities of The Giaour, many ofwhich have been passed over by critics of Roman­ tic Orientalism. For critical studies that have focused on The Giaours fragment form and multiple narrators as articulations primarily of Byron’s aesthetic, psychological, or otherwise existential concerns, see Robert Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 91—138; Jerome J. McGann, Fiery Dust: Byron’s Poetic Devel­ opment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 141—64; and David Seed, “‘Disjointed Fragments’: Concealment and Revelation in The Giaour,” The ByronJournal 18 (1990): 14— 27. Daniel P. Watkins and Maijorie Levinson investigate the poem’s political anxieties, but read its formal strategies as a symbolic abstraction or repression ofthose anxieties. See Watkins, “Social Relations in Byron’s The Giaour,” ELH 52, no. 4 (1985): 873—92; and Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina SiR, 54 (Spring 2015) 3 4 YIN YUAN Meyer’s deconstructive approach is a notable exception, with its thorough­ going attention to the way the text’s formal logic—its disruptions and lacunae—“problematizes the production of ideology in narrative.” For Meyer, however, these disruptions are ultimately “unwitting” textual ef­ fects that elude and “refuse the desire of its assumed author”: “despite the arguably deconstructive propensities of Byron’s text, The Giaour remains a fundamentally hegemonic narrative, centered on the extension of Western cultural superiority over the East in an agonistic struggle of dominance contested and (re)confirmed in the dramatic battle of Giaour and Pascha.”2 Meyer’s cynicism stems from his reading of the colonialist position through Edward Said’s framework in Orientalism.'1 Thus, Byron’s The Giaour is a “text[ ] of Romantic Orientalism [that] must therefore be read as part of the cultural apparatus whereby the Orient is contained and rep­ resented by ideological frameworks that serve both to incite confronta­ tion and to seal off contestation within the larger structures of imperial his­ tory. ”4 Developments in the study of Romantic imperialism within the last two decades, however, have complicated Said’s excessively rigid binary structure, highlighting the insecurities and ambivalences that haunt the dis­ courses of empire.3 Byron’s anxieties about his own oriental productions have been critically and compellingly documented by Nigel Leask. I would like to develop Leask’s insights by considering at greater length the formal strategies of The Giaour, a poem about which Leask does not say...

The Orient and the Young Romantics by Andrew Warren

438 BOOK REVIEWS affects (appreciation, thankfulness, gratitude, humility)” can quietly emerge apart from “the logic of mutuality” (128). Interestingly, the section on “Frost at Midnight” is one of the few moments where Romantic Intimacy explicitly addresses extant political renderings of its particular Romantic canon. Yousefis fully cognizant ofthe unsettling implications of Dorothy’s silence in “Tintern Abbey” and Sara’s abstraction in “Eolian Harp” (12627 ), or the politics of utility in “Old Cumberland Beggar” (91), and she is careful to note that “[t]he sense that self-involvement precludes, or seeks to evade, engagement with communal and civic life only duplicates the rigid opposition between solitude and sociality that a poem such as ‘Frost at Midnight’ interrogates” (123). As rejoinders go, this is entirely reasonable, and left me wondering what Yousef’s dexterous argument about the com­ plicities of mute presence would look like in more explicitly political set­ tings, such as Wordsworth’s “September 1, 1802,” with its supremely awk­ ward silence around the sonnet’s black female refugee. This is to say, there is a certain insularity to Romantic Intimacy that isn’t surprising given its method and critical program: it reconsiders a range of highly canonical Romantic texts we thought we knew, and attunes us to the strangeness of that knowledge. Scott J. Juengel Vanderbilt University Andrew Warren. The Orient and the Young Romantics. Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 2014. Pp. 279. $99. The answers Andrew Warren offers to the question with which he begins this book—why did the young Romantics so often set their poems in the Orient or in Orientalized settings—are doubly pitched toward a poetics of Lacanian mirrors that refract self and world and the political moment of post-Terror Romanticism. These features of Romanticism in its second phase (and, arguably, soon into its first) are complexly and valuably joined in this book. For if the figure of the Oriental despot repeats, at a seemingly safe cultural distance, the solipsism that the Romantic interiority of being necessarily risks, despotism and a putatively “Oriental” fatalism together constitute the political predicament of liberal Romanticism, even as the threat of global likeness makes conservative Romantics edgy. For the sec­ ond Romantic generation, Warren contends, a poetics caught or entangled in the mirror imaginings of the poetic self as exile, foreigner, and other is enmeshed in a political impasse whose Orientalized name is “despotism,” but whose political contours look more like the impossible inheritance, SiR, 54 (Fall 2015) BOOK REVIEWS 439 post revolution, of a social contract that is flawed (or inevitable) in the same way that the figure of the solitary poet who would change the world is flawed. Both, this book suggests, figure in the political imaginary of Romantic poets and nation states and become the troubled and reworked poetic ground for Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Keats. For this second generation, Warren insists, multiple ironies, a virtual hall of mirrored ironies, mark their poetic, imagined “Orient” in ways that presage Edward Said’s analysis of the Orientalism of Western writers as it­ self a phantasmatic, over-decorated fiction. The difficulty of separating what the Orient is or was from the way it was Orientalized is from this vantage point as much a Romantic problem as it would become Said’s and ours. What Warren’s study brings to scholarly understanding of Romantic Orientalism is a more critically poised recognition of how the second generation understood, rather sharply, the ricochet effect of projecting their poetic and political anxieties onto an Oriental scene that re­ fracted their own dubieties. The shape of Warren’s argument helps to make its double impact effec­ tive. A fine introduction considers the rhetorical and figurative impulses of Romantic Orientalism: a tendency to invoke earlier texts as pre-texts, a predisposition to worry about solipsism as both a poetic condition and globally untenable, and a recognition, philosophical and poetic, ofbelated­ ness. These features mark Warren’s analysis of Wordsworth’s famous Dream of the Arab, and the post-Wordsworthian echoes of that episode. Subsequent chapters feature astute readings of poems by Shelley, Byron, and Keats that emphasize the difficulty of arriving at an external perspec­ tive. Being entangled with...

Feminism, Vegetarianism, and Colonial Resistance in Eighteenth-Century British Novels

Contrary to accepted belief, a discourse replete with religious, medical, and moral arguments emerged during the eighteenth century. Moreover, anti-meat utterances, whenever they occurred, were often politically charged--shot through with questions regarding the status of women, animals, and Hindoos (Regan 15). Until recently, most histories of vegetarianism paid little attention to the eighteenth century, making only passing reference to it and reserving rigorous explication of the discourse for the mid-nineteenth century and later. A few anthologies, however, went a step further and assembled canonical eighteenth-century statements on the issue but stopped short of treating them as literary phenomena. (1) This belated attention to the proto-vegetarianism of the eighteenth century is not surprising given that the word vegetarian was not coined until 1847, and vegetarianism did not find its institutional expression until 1849 with the founding of Great Britain's Vegetarian Society. (2) Figuring prominently into this proto-vegetarian discourse are British perceptions of India. In eighteenth-century writings on India, the vegetarianism of the Hindus was at first considered a curiosity and later as evidence of racial inferiority. The English had associated their own hearty consumption of beef with military superiority. (3) But now (as we shall see in the writings of Dow, Orme, Falconer, and others) they were associating beef-eating with superiority over not just military rivals but colonial subjects like the East Indians, who were, according to William Smellie's 1791 Philosophy of Natural History, a meager, sick, and feeble race due to their diet (144). A vegetable diet, it was thought, contributed to weakness, indolence, and military ineptitude and, consequently, races like the East Indians were destined for subordination. But such politicized colonial discourse soon gave rise to its obverse. Female novelists like Phebe Gibbes in Hartly House, Calcutta (1789) and Eliza Hamilton in Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796) opposed the denigration of the other by contributing to an incipient feminist-vegetarian discourse (a discourse more explicit in the essays of contemporaries like Catharine Macaulay and Mary Hays). Both created a voice of female-centered authority in the literature of romantic orientalism, a voice of authority from which to critique the imperial project. They inevitably noticed an important fact about India that makes it unique among the world's cultures: vegetarianism was a normative feature of the culture. Critics have been divided over whether these novels support or criticize the imperialist project and over the extent to which they critique structures of class, race, and gender in Great Britain. One thing is certain--both defend the colonial administration of Warren Hastings and the East India Company. Mona Narain finds in Hamilton's novel such strong support for a paternalistic vision of a benevolent English empire that any critique of patriarchy is compromised (598). Claire Grogan, on the other hand, asserts that Hamilton's critique of patriarchy is alive and well, as evidenced by her creation of an alternative female discourse of the East--one that contributes to and contests the field of Orientalism (29). Gibbes, too, explores a new discursive space in her creation of Sophia Goldbourne, a voice of moral authority on the East who speaks the language of sensibility. In what follows, I first establish how the imperial discourse surrounding vegetarianism reflects a gendered language of emasculation. Next, I examine Hamilton's and Gibbe's novels as critical responses. Such responses, when read through a feminist viewpoint, can be understood as contributing to the emergence of a modern, politically self-conscious discourse. These novels, through their encounter with the other, express sensitivity to the parallel oppression of women and animals in a patriarchal culture. …

ALLA TURCA VERSUS THE ROMANTIC EAST: E.T.A. HOFFMANN AND ORIENTAL‐STYLE MUSIC*

ABSTRACTIn the field of German Romantic Orientalism, E.T.A. Hoffmann represents a unique voice. He not only employs oriental imagery in his fiction, but also comments on the cultural production of the Orient within the German states. Following Friedrich Schlegel's assertion that the truly Romantic was to be sought in the East, Hoffmann questions the ways in which the Orient was constructed in German art, assessing its Romantic credentials. One example of this is found in his response to popular alla turca music. As the presentation of the Orient by composers such as Mozart and Gluck influenced literary depictions of the East, Hoffmann examines the means by which such music was produced and shows that attempts to mimic the Orient can be anti‐Romantic. His music reviews and his stories Ritter Gluck (1809) and Das Sanctus (1816) reveal an ambiguous response to alla turca music on the grounds that it did not always satisfy Romantic aesthetics. Looking East is therefore not always a Romantic undertaking. Hoffmann's critical reponse to alla turca is part of an aesthetic guide for modern artists wishing to profit from the Romantic potential of the Orient, and provides a new angle from which to consider Romantic Orientalism.

РОМАНТИЧНИЙ ОРІЄНТАЛІЗМ: УКРАЇНСЬКА МОДЕЛЬ

The purpose of this paper is to present the Ukrainian model of Romantic orientalism. The imago-poetics’ main assumptions of Frontier Eastern, Caucasian, Egyptian are discovered. The ethnic character of an Asian (romanticized Crimean Tatars and Nogai people) is also analyzed.

Desert passions: Orientalism and romance novels

* Acknowledgments * Introduction * Chapter 1. Loving the Orient: The Romantic East and European Literature * Chapter 2. The Rise of the Desert Romance Novel * Chapter 3. E. M. Hull's The Sheik * Chapter 4. The Spectacular East: Romantic Orientalism in America * Chapter 5. The Orientalist Historical Romance Novel * Chapter 6. The Contemporary Sheik Romance Novel: The Historical Background * Chapter 7. Harems, Houris, Heroines, and Heroes * Chapter 8. From Tourism to Terrorism * Chapter 9. Reader Responses to the Modern Orientalist Romance Novel * Conclusion * Notes * Bibliography * Index

Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel

Eighteenth-century English and French fiction, Srinivas Aravamudan shows, staged a contest of fabulist forms and translations against nationalist and domestic mimesis. The former opened up new horizons of transcultural utopia, where the latter (and the victor) sought to ground and discipline readers' imaginations. That domestic realism won should not blind us to the attractions of its competitor nor lead us to view that competitor as less ‘enlightened’, less a product of the modern moment. In its flight to the fantastic and its celebration of the plural and playful potentialities of experiments with the Orient, Aravamudan's book is in agreement with another significant work just published in the area, Marina Warner's Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the ‘Arabian Nights’ (London: Chatto & Windus, 2011), but its argument comes to rest on altogether different territory. Where Warner sees the oriental tale as a form of fancy dress that domesticates, commercializes, and neutralizes magical thinking in a modernizing (Western) society, Aravamudan claims more agency and philosophical coherence among the ‘constellation’ of texts he selects for discussion, revealing a ‘compelling pattern’ (p. 30), an opportunity lost (indeed consciously suppressed) for an ‘experimental, prospective, and antifoundationalist’ thought experiment (p. 4) in Europe. Aravamudan terms this ‘Enlightenment Orientalism’, a plural, fertile pursuit of knowledge through fictional play that builds on the philological and theological investigations of Renaissance orientalism and is more open to experiment than its successor, a Romantic orientalism anxious to contain and control foreign forces. He charts this thought experiment convincingly through five ‘modes’ — not quite genres, not quite themes, more groupings of different examples of oriental tale-telling with a shared angle of vision. The first part addresses two different modes of pseudoethnography: first, spy stories/surveillance chronicles, secret histories, and second, the fictional correspondence of oriental informants travelling in the Occident. The second part describes three different modes of transcultural allegory: first, stories of discoveries of new and other worlds (lunar, planetary, animal, or geographically remote); second, libertine orientalism; and third, scandalous accounts of European courts relocated in oriental locales. Aravamudan's erudition, the depth and breadth of his knowledge, to pursue a challenging thesis is everywhere evident. The committed difficulty of his style does not make for easy reading but can deliver striking insight. Particularly fine and original is the third chapter, in which Aravamudan finds a resistance to single or simple moral truths and correspondences in a variety of accounts of discoveries of new worlds, travels to remote nations, and animal fables: here, for example, surprising and convincing connections are found between the oriental animal fable and Book IV of Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Especially gratifying throughout the book is the interwoven analysis of French and English sources uncovering a stimulating philosophical and creative traffic resistant to nationalist agendas. Aravamudan's commitment to opening up the plurality of oriental modes has the slightly perverse effect of rendering the ‘novel’ an apparently relentless and totalizing machine designed to suppress difference and indulge a parochial interest in personality. However, the fine and fine-grained original readings of texts familiar (Behn's Oroonoko, Defoe's Roxana, Montesquieu's Lettres persanes) and strange (Haywood's Eovaai, Smollett's History and Adventures of an Atom) prove a source of compensatory wonder.

Revolution, Rebellion and a Rajah from Rohilkhand: Recontextualizing Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah

SONJA LAWRENSON Revolution, Rebellion and a Rajah from Rohilkhand: Recontextualizing Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translation ofthe Letters ofa Hindoo Rajah A ppearing over two centuries after translation of the letters of .a Hindoo Rajah was first published in 1796, Pamela Perkins and Shan­ non Russell’s latest edition ofthis text has undoubtedly succeeded in rekin­ dling interest in an author whose literary reputation was, hitherto, all but extinguished. Indeed, since its republication in 1999, Elizabeth Hamilton’s earliest fiction has increasingly garnered the attention of a small yet bur­ geoning contemporary readership intrigued by the narrative’s forthright and detailed explorations of key Romantic-era debates concerning female education, the revolution in France, and the nine-year-long impeachment trial of Warren Hastings. Presented in an epistolary format, the text fol­ lows the adventures of Zaarmilla, Rajah of Almora and “a native Prince of Rohilcund [Rohilkhand].”1 In the first volume Zaarmilla determines to visit England after a British soldier unveils to him “the grandeur of sublim­ ity and the simplicity oftruth” contained within the bible (TLHR 83). The second volume delineates his voyage to, and period of residence in, Eng­ land, where his encounters with slave owners, capricious aristocrats, skepti­ cal philosophers and belligerent women results in his eventual disillusion­ ment with English culture. By explicitly commenting upon British society The author wishes to acknowledge the receipt of an award from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences in support of this research. 1. Elizabeth Hamilton, Translation ofthe Letters ofa Hindoo Rajah, eds. Pamela Perkins and Shannon Russell (1796; Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1999), 244. Hereafter cited as TLHR. SiR, 51 (Summer 2012) 125 126 SONJA LAWRENSON in the aftermath of the French Revolution and in the face of accelerated imperial expansionism in the East, Hamilton’s Translation clearly speaks to recent feminist and postcolonial concerns regarding women’s complex and fraught negotiations with the emerging imperialist and nationalist ideolo­ gies of late eighteenth-century Europe. However, while the critical methodologies applied by both feminist and postcolonial scholars have indubitably opened up a new and vital discursive field for the exploration of female responses to the evolving concepts of empire and nationhood, Hamilton’s location within our literary discussions of this period remains at best problematic and at worst untenable. For, as Anne Mellor observes in a 2005 essay entitled “Romantic Orientalism Be­ gins at Home,” such criticism has “tended to reduce the novel to imperial­ ist and anti-feminist stereotypes, thus erasing the complexity of Hamilton’s satire.”2 Mellor’s observation here serves as a timely reminder of Janice Thaddeus’s earlier objection that second-wave feminism had imposed an anachronistic interpretative lens upon Hamilton’s works, thereby obfuscat­ ing the equivocal and oft-contradictory position of a writer such as Hamil­ ton in relation to the dominant discourses of this period. In “Elizabeth Hamilton’s Domestic Politics” (1994), Thaddeus lambasts these scholars for stereotyping Hamilton’s work as “conservative,” arguing that twentiethcentury feminists’ own ideological investment in the revolutionary debates ofthe 1790s had led to an unscrupulous conflation ofanti-jacobinism, con­ servatism, and patriarchalism on the one hand and Jacobinism, liberalism, and feminism on the other: The fact is that the liberal versus conservative yardstick—no more than the Jacobin/anti-Jacobin one—simply does not adequately meas­ ure women’s politics. To place Hamilton on the liberal conservative continuum, to judge her by these rules, is like trying a woman from one country by the laws of another.3 Here, Thaddeus renders Hamilton’s dislocation from the masculine realm of British politics into a simile of national alterity. Inadvertently, however, she also touches upon an issue that could pose an even greater threat to these neat dichotomies than Hamilton’s gender—namely, the cultural dif­ ference signified by her Ulster-Scots background. Born in Belfast, but raised for the most part in the hinterlands of Stirling, Scotland, Elizabeth Hamilton’s cultural identity and its colonial 2. Anne K. Mellor, “Romantic Orientalism Begins at Home: Elizabeth Hamilton’s Trans­ lation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah,” SiR 44, no. 2 (2005): 152. 3. Janice Farrar Thaddeus, “Elizabeth Hamilton’s Domestic Politics,” Studies in EighteenthCentury...

The Native Performant: Linguistic Authority in the Text of Romantic Orientalism

This article builds on postcolonial critiques of colonialism's reliance on the figure of the ``native informant.'' In early-nineteenth-century Britain, the emergent discipline of orientalism required the native informant to ratify its claims to knowledge; at the same time, orientalism was a key component of Romantic reimaginings of language as a productive force. While the native informant guarantees the referential truth of colonial discourse, this essay details the simultaneous emergence of a figure termed the ``native performant,'' who dramatizes the performative power of Western language. Examining scenes from Robert Southey's The Curse of Kehama, Lord Byron's Lara, and Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, the author argues that European power is staged by subjecting a figure of the East to a kind of language that functions as a conduit of pure force rather than a tool of communication. These scenes of linguistic triumphalism, the essay contends, highlight the double performativity of orientalist discourse: orientalism both performs and by performing enacts the West's power of command over the East.

Female Immigration as a Catalyst for Ritual Practice: A Social History of Hinduism in the United States

Demographic shifts among Hindu populations in the United States are intimately related to the types of Hinduism that have flourished in the American diaspora. Prior to the 1965 Immigration Act, Hindu ambassadors, Hindu texts, and missionary accounts formed a Hindu imaginary highly influenced by neo-Vedantic ideology. After 1965, ordinary women and female gurus joined the small populations of Hindu male immigrants and Hindu gurus active in the United States. As a result, the neo-Vedantic version of Hinduism that had stood in for the whole of Hinduism prior to 1965 was forced to diversify because of the religious demands made by the gamete of immigrant Indian Hindu families and the multiple Hindu religiosities presented by popular Hindu gurus. This demographic shift impacted the transition of Hinduism in the United States from a masculinised neo-Vedantic interpretation (1820-1965) to its diversification (1965-present), of which a major component is the integration of the feminine. Prior to the 1965 Immigration Act, which brought Hindu families in large numbers to the United States, neo-Vedantin gurus were the primary propagators of 'Hindu- ism' in the United States. 1 However, it would be more accurate to argue that they imported a particular form of Hindu spirituality that emerged from the colonial encounter and was coloured by Orientalism. The religious reformers of the nine- teenth century, both nationalists and independent religious adepts (gurus), shaped their ideologies in reaction to the Romantic orientalism of the colonial period. Where orientalists depicted the native as lazy, effeminate, and degenerate, Hindu reformers inverted these tropes into 'a nationalist self-assertion (that) took the form of a meticulous reversal of the orientalist-anglicist double hypothesis'. This response 'did not upset the belief in the underlying thematic of Romantic orient- alism affirming the existence of cultural essences and civilizational norms and ten- dencies'. 2 Nineteenth century neo-Vedantin reformers drew their ideas from Shankara's Advaita Vedanta, but shaped them with their concerns to respond to the cultural essentialism enacted by their colonial oppressors. They crafted a 'mas- culine' neo-Hinduism that emphasised European demands for rationalism and democracy, which they supplemented with a dedication to social welfare, science,

Arabian Nights and Romantic Orientalism in Modern Europe

Arabian Nights and Romantic Orientalism in Modern Europe

‘Oriental’ and ‘Orientalist’ Poetry: The Debate in Literary Criticism in the Romantic Period

Seven years earlier, Robert Southey used Vedic mythology as the basis for his own Oriental epic, The Curse of Kehama (1810). Critics dismissed the poem as absurd and it was widely remaindered. Yet in the same year that Mill made his notorious remarks, Thomas Moore published his bestselling Oriental poem, Lalla Rookh. Moore’s poem sold a staggering 22,500 copes over 15 editions between 1817 and 1829 alone, fully justifying the 2000 guineas his publisher Thomas Longman paid for it. Byron’s ‘Turkish Tales’ series (1813–14) also sold widely and established the poet’s reputation as a literary lion. Evidently there was a right way and wrong way to write Orientalist verse. How then do we account for these apparently contradictory attitudes towards Eastern culture, given the well-documented vogue for Orientalism taking place in Britain during the Romantic period? Edward Said’s definition of Orientalism as ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’ has long been seen as inadequate in accounting for the wide variety of ways in which European writers engaged with the East, not least because it reduces the complexity of literature to a set of colonial or commercial imperatives. This article considers how contemporary literary criticism, from the belles-lettrists of the mid eighteenth-century to the writings of Mill, Coleridge and Wordsworth, influenced the composition of British Orientalist poetry in the decades after 1800, the high point of Romantic Orientalism. It begins with a survey of opinions on Oriental literature generally, that is, the perceived qualities of imaginative writing produced in the East as opposed to Europe, or the temperate zone, and progresses to the critical reception of Southey’s Curse of Kehama and Moore’s Lalla Rookh, poems that were frequently taken as negative and positive exemplars of the Orientalist genre. I argue that, during the Romantic period, developments in literary criticism, and particularly those concerning imaginative sympathy, were responsible for driving Orientalist poetry into ever more westernised forms. Strict critical parameters governed what was and was not aesthetically acceptable in poetry, chief among which was the Andrew Rudd

German Orientalisms by Todd Kontje

MLR, I02.4, 2007 1 I93 and yet itsunderlying agenda is not entirely dissimilar. This collection, stemming from a conference held inBudapest in 2003, explores Benjamin's writings on the technicalmedia, but does so through a critical reflectionon Benjamin's appropriation as figurehead, pioneer, and founding father ofmedia theory.As Nicolas Pethes ar gues, Benjamin's huge popularity in disciplines across thehumanities isoften based on a small corpus of textswhich are read in isolation not only fromBenjamin's wider aeuvre but also from his time and culture. The collection aims to counteract this tendency by linkingBenjamin's media analyses with related concerns in hiswritings while also bringing out the cultural-historical specificityof his reflections. The inner complexities of Benjamin's writings are the subject of Cornelia Zum busch's article,which traces thediverse uses of the term Medium in texts fromhis early theory of language, 'Uber die Sprache uiberhaupt und fiberdie Sprache des Men schen', via his Trauerspiel study toworks of the 1930S, such as the 'Proust' essay and Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert.The historicity ofBenjamin's media theory is the subject of Roland Innerhofer's article,which explores his engagement with film as amulti-sensory spectacle while highlighting the inherent anachronism of his con centration on silent film.As Pethes points out, amore sensitive reading ofBenjamin's 'media theory' should extend to a consideration ofBenjamin's practical engagement with themedia. Davide Giuriato puts this into practice in his piece on Benjamin's writing practices, outlining the critic's ambivalent stance towards the typewriterand his concomitant strategy of micrographic writing, especially in the letters,which emphasizes thevisual dimension of his textsover their referentialcontent. This rela tionship between 'Medienreflexion und Medienpraxis' (p. I I7) inBenjamin's works is certainly an intriguing approach which should be pursued further. Although not all articles live up to the volume's self-declared critical agenda, itsoverall direction is constructive and provides an important antidote toBenjamin's often narrow and ahistorical appropriation by particular disciplines. WADHAM COLLEGE,OXFORD CAROLINDUTTLINGER German Orientalisms. By TODD KONTJE. Ann Arbor: University ofMichigan Press. 2004. X+3I6 pp. $35. ISBN 978-O-472-II392-7. This is a very good, ambitious, timely,concise, yetwide-ranging study. It has two chief cognitive interests.The first is to test our received conventions for applying Edward Said's concept ofOrientalism toGerman literature.The second, building on the results of that investigation, is to ask where the place ofGerman literary studies might be in the system of thehumanities inour globalized age. Kontje's answers, ifnot revolutionary, have themerit of rattling convention and revalorizing our discipline. German literature,he says,has always been fundamentally concerned with defining German identity,and has thereforealmost from thebeginning contained a hard core of intellectual engagement with other cultures. The category ofOrientalism, theexercise of knowledge-power over the representation of theEastern other, has therefore, irre spective of the factual existence of a colonial empire, always been intimately relevant to the study ofGerman literature.This contention Kontje elaborates in a series of re presentative analyses of canonic authors well selected for thepurpose, from Wolfram toGrimmelshausen and Lohenstein, several Romantics, Goethe, Freytag, Thomas Mann, Grass, and Botho Strauss (not to forgeta peroration on Ozdamar and Roes). As he must, Kontje reaches the impeccably Saidian conclusion thatGerman Orien talism, like other kinds, is at bottom a solipsistic discourse. But he also argues that within thisSaidian framework there exist fourvarieties ofOrientalism. One, crystal lized by earlyChristian-German nation-building from Wolfram toLohenstein, both I I94 Reviews effaces and subversively embraces difference. Romantic Orientalism isby contrast a kind of highly specific national cultural imperialism generated by the imagination of an untravelled provincial (Hardenberg). This apparently unsympathetic variant is, however, conceived on themodel of a receptive, feminized, characteristically German cosmopolitanism and deployed in conscious opposition to aggressive French post Revolutionary imperialism as theexport of amentality which isprogressively open to cultural difference. Fascist Orientalism (Baeumler, Bachofen) fears the feminization of the West and opposes to fantasized Oriental aggression a hypertrophic, homosocial and -sexual resistance. This one ismost closely affiliatedwith the rise of National Socialist imperialism. The last concerns Germany in its most Prussian configuration, and is oriented towards or against the colonization of the nearest East, Silesia, and...

In the Name of the "Incestuous Mother": Islam and Excremental Protestantism in De Quincey's Infidel Book

Resisting most postcolonial readings of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, this essay argues that Thomas De Quincey's experience of Asiatic idolatry as excrement—the moment of radical abjection during the Malay encounter—is a crucial symbolic register for the failure to convert the pagan or infidel to the ways of Anglican Christianity. This disruption of the Trinitarian-imperialist ethos is uniquely Protestant in that the narrator's Lutheran-iconoclastic fascination with the power of the demonic "Other" requires the smashing of the dark idol, a series of psychotic parodies of the Christian resurrection that results (at the unconscious level) in Islamic abjection: the negation of the idolatrous Trinity (the paternal metaphor) in the name of the "incestuous (M)other." As a result, Confessions undercuts the paternal law of the Trinitarian mythos. An oriental-matrilineal narrative depicting maternal incest replaces the Christian Oedipal narrative, in which the son is reborn once he "murders" his father. I propose that De Quincey's ambivalent view of Islam calls into question essentialized notions of Romantic Orientalism and xenophobia as well as the psychoanalytic frameworks through which critics, since Freud, traditionally have interpreted the history of prophetic monotheism.

Romantic Orientalism Begins at Home: Elizabeth Hamilton's "Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah"

ELIZABETH HAMILTON'S SUBTLE AND NUANCED ANALYSIS OF THE INTERSECTION of Hindu and British culture published in 1796 is a core text for our understanding of Romantic orientalism. is based on an extensive familiarity with Hindu law, literature, religious practice and politics, which Hamilton gained from her brother Charles, a self-taught and passionate orientalist who served under Warren Hastings in India from 1772-1786 before returning to Scotland to translate the Hindu legal code, the Hedaya, into English. is therefore particularly odd that this novel has been so neglected by scholars of Romantic-era British imperialism. Nigel Leask affords it only a passing (and not entirely accurate) glance in his British Romantic Writers and the East; Tim Fulford and Peter Kitson ignore it in their three-chapter synthetic overview of the issue in Romanticism and Colonialism, as do the other contributors to this volume; and Saree Makdisi makes no mention of Hamilton's novel in his Romantic Imperialism. (1) Nor does Leask rectify this omission of Hamilton's text in his chapter on women travel-writers and the East in his recent Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770-1840: 'From an Antique Land,' where he continues to cite her first name incorrectly. (2) Hamilton's novel deserves far more sustained attention than these critics have provided, since it constructs a very different picture of the relationship of Britain to India from the one promoted by such canonical Romantic writers as Byron, Percy Shelley, De Quincey, Coleridge and Scott. This is not to say that Hamilton's novel has been entirely ignored by academic critics and scholars. Both feminist and post-colonialist critics have been attracted to the novel's obvious engagement with the British presence in India presented by a woman. But these critics have tended to reduce the novel to imperialist and anti-feminist stereotypes, thus erasing the full complexity of Hamilton's satire. Admittedly, at first glance Elizabeth Hamilton's Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796) appears to be what Edward Said would call an orientalizing text. The novel's Hindu characters--Zaarmilla, Maandaara and Sheermal--arguably conform to Said's influential, if now contested, definition of the western production of the Orient as unscientific, irrational, feminine, childish, submissive, depraved, distant, in contrast to its representation of England as masculine, scientific, rational, Christian and above all civilized. (3) Critics who have chosen to focus on the novel's imperialist dimensions have stressed the Rajah Zaarmilla's naivete, his unreliability, his benighted racism, and above all his unthinking acceptance of the low status of Indian women, whom he eagerly trades in marriage, keeps subservient, denies a useful education, and condemns to sati. In this vein, one could also point out that Zaarmilla is effectively feminized in England, where in public he becomes the object rather than the possessor of the specular gaze, defined as an exotic display for English eyes. These critics, most notably Isobel Grundy, Gary Kelly, Claire Grogan and Susan Taylor, (4) have finally rested their case on the novel's imperialist endorsement, through the voice of Zaarmilla, of the British rule in India as the salvation of the Hindu people. As Zaarmilla enthuses, Benevolent people of England! it is their desire, that all should be partakers of the same blessings of liberty which they themselves enjoy. was doubtless with this glorious view, that they sent forth colonies to enlighten, and instruct, the vast regions of America. To disseminate the love of virtue and freedom, they cultivated the trans-Atlantic isles: and to rescue our nation from the hands of the Oppressor, did this brave and generous people visit the shores of Hindoostan. (5) As Grundy and Taylor further note, Zaarmilla even credits the British with restoring the laws (163) and saving the artifacts of Hindu culture: It is by these strangers that the annals of Hindostan, which her barbarian conquerors have sought to obliterate in the blood of her children, shall be restored! …