LITERARY ORIENTALISM IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ANGLO-AMERICAN LITERATURE: ITS FORMATION AND CONTINUITY

SAAD ABDULRAHMAN AL-BAZEI, Purdue University

Abstract

This study deals with the perceptions and uses of the Arabo-Islamic Orient in nineteenth-century Anglo-American literature. The thesis of the study is that those perceptions and uses form a systematic corpus of literary figures, a discourse on the Orient, that is authorized and sustained by the codes of Western culture, and by the exigencies of the time and place where this discourse is articulated. Literary Orientalism is the term used to describe such a discourse. The study is divided into two parts. Part One begins with a historical assessment (Chapter I), followed by an exposition of the theoretical framework informing the thesis (Chapter II). Part Two focuses on literary Orientalism in nineteenth-century Anglo-American literature. Chapter III discusses British romantic Orientalism emphasizing the work of Robert Southey and Lord Byron as representative cases. The argument here is that the Orientalism of Southey and Byron is informed by the metaphor of redemption, which, in Southey, continues the metaphor of conversion in medieval and renaissance literature; while in Byron redemption becomes self-redemption, a rejuvenation of Western political and cultural strength. In the Victorian phase of literary Orientalism it is self-redemption that continues (Chapter IV). Matthew Arnold and George Eliot are among those who emphasize the Occidentalization of British culture, which leads eventually to the burlesque emulation of Oriental literary forms and the strong resurgence of the strategy of using the Orient as a vehicle for confronting local problems. In Chapter V, the discussion of the American phase of literary Orientalism is directed towards validating the argument that the perceptions and uses of the Orient in writers such as Emerson, Melville, and Mark Twain reveal the special nature of the American cultural experience while remaining part of Western literary Orientalism in general.

Degree

Ph.D.

Subject Area

British and Irish literature

COinS