Interpreting the Orient Travellers in Egypt and the Near East

by Starkey, Paul; Starkey, Janet

• ISBN13: 9780863722585
• ISBN10: 086372258X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-04-10
• Publisher: Ithaca Press

Summary

Egypt and the Near East have enchanted many people over the centuries. Travellers from the West have journeyed to this region for a variety of motives: in pursuit of knowledge, power, diplomacy and trade, for pleasure and adventure, on pilgrimage, and to plunder and discover the exotic - or sometimes simply to discover themselves. Some have been influenced more than others by what they saw, bringing back tangible evidence of their visits in the form of antiquities or other collectors' items; many have used their observations and experiences for their own literary and artistic ends. This collection of papers has its origin in the conference "Travellers to Egypt and the Near East" held at St Catherine's College, Oxford in July 1997. They are arranged approximately in chronological order - though with so many common themes running through them, a strict sequence according to a single criterion has proved almost impossible. In addition to the chronological sequence, the reader will detect a number of common themes - religion, gender, economics, colonialism, perceptions of literature and art and so forth that haunt the essays and form webs of interconnection between them. The papers included in this volume range from those on Carl Haag and Gertrude Bell to gender politics in a colonial context. These essays provide a fascinating array of perspectives on a set of historical, literary and cultural relationships about which debate is certain to continue well into the twenty-first century.

Author Biography

Paul Starkey studied Arabic and Persian at Oxford and now teaches at the University of Durham. He is the author of From the Ivory Tower: A Critical Study of Tawfiq al-Hakim (1987) and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature (1988). Janet Starkey studied social anthropology in Edinburgh and London and now teaches material culture at the University of Durham. She has worked extensively in the museum field, and is particularly interested in the ethnography of Egypt and Sudan

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(6)
Paul
Janet Starkey
About-Face: Sir David Wilkie's Portrait of `Mehemet Ali'	7	(16)
Emily M. Weeks
Carl Haag 1820--1915: Fact or Fantasy?	23	(12)
Cornelia Oelwein
John Frederick Lewis: `In Knowledge of the Orientals Quite One of Themselves'	35	(16)
Briony Llewellyn
Charles Newton
William Holman Hunt's Visits to Egypt: Passion, Prejudice and Truth to Nature	51	(18)
Judith Bronkhurst
David Urquhart and the Role of Travel Literature in the Introduction of Turkish Baths to Victorian England	69	(12)
Nebahat Avcioglu
J. Wolff and H. Stern: Missionaries in Yemen	81	(16)
Aviva Klein-Franke
The Copts of Egypt: Neither Christian nor Egyptian?	97	(14)
Hoda Gindi
Gender Politics in a Colonial Context: Victorian Women's Accounts of Egypt	111	(12)
Sahar Sobhi Abdel-Hakim
The Image of Nineteenth-Century Cairo as a Medieval City in Kinglake's Eothen	123	(16)
Loubna A. Youssef
`While I was in Egypt, I finished Dr. Thorne'	139	(14)
Nadia Gindy
On Translating The Englishwoman in Egypt into Arabic	153	(12)
Azza Kararah
Amelia Edwards: From Novelist to Egyptologist	165	(10)
Patricia O'Neill
Amelia Edwards, Jennie Lane and Egypt	175	(10)
Brenda E. Moon
Oriental Motifs in the Poetry of Nikolay Gumilev	185	(14)
Marianna Taymanova
`Ah! That the Desert were my Dwelling Place': The Romance of Persia in the Early Writings of Gertrude Bell	199	(10)
Katharine Chubbuck
Orientalism and Gender: The Condition and Status of Women in Morocco	209	(26)
Amy J. Johnson
Select Bibliography	235	(34)
Index	269