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

by Haddad,Emily A.

• ISBN13: 9780754603047
• ISBN10: 0754603040
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781351913218
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-01-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Orientalist Poetics is the only book on literary orientalism that spans the nineteenth century in both England and France with particular attention to poetry and poetics. It convincingly demonstrates orientalism's centrality to the evolution of poetry and poetics in both nations, and provides a singularly comprehensive and definitive analysis of the aesthetic impact of orientalism on nineteenth-century poetry. Because it examines the poetry of the entire century across both national literatures, the book is in a unique position to articulate the essential part orientalism plays in major developments of nineteenth-century poetics.Orientalist Poetics effectively bridges the gap between the analysis of poetics and the analysis of orientalism. In showing that major poetic developments have roots in orientalism, Haddad's book offers a valuable and innovative revisionist view of nineteenth-century literary history.

Author Biography

Emily A. Haddad received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. Since 1997 she has taught in the Department of English at the University of South Dakota, where she is an associate professor

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Introduction	1	(10)
To instruct without displeasing: Percy Shelley's The Revolt of Islam and Robert Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer	11	(43)
Instruction in The Revolt of Islam	13	(4)
Tyranny: the Orient's chief export	17	(4)
Tyranny's comrades: religion and sexism	21	(4)
Orientalism and Shelley's poetics	25	(3)
Morals vs. materials: instruction and pleasure in Thalaba the Destroyer	28	(5)
The desert, Islam: foreignness as a hermeneutic category	33	(2)
Foreignness general and particular: character as archetype	35	(6)
Extremes: too many notes?	41	(4)
Southey and his readers: delighted, informed, or distressed	45	(2)
Representation and the ``Arabesque ornament''	47	(7)
Representing, misrepresenting, not representing: Victor Hugo's Les Orientales and Alfred de Musset's ``Namouna''	54	(47)
Hugo's preface: poetic ideals and the Orient as subject	55	(4)
``La Douleur du pacha'': the Orient as origin or as end	59	(3)
``Adieux de l'hotesse arabe'': stasis	62	(3)
``Novembre'': returning to Paris, the self, and mimesis	65	(5)
Hugo's critics: E.J. Chetelat	70	(4)
George Gordon Byron's Don Juan: ``But what's reality?''	74	(5)
``Namouna'': fragmentary representation	79	(6)
No narrative no representation	85	(5)
Authority referents, and representation	90	(7)
The Middle East: ``impossible a decrire''	97	(4)
Orientalist poetics and the nature of the Middle East	101	(54)
William Wordsworth and the nature of the Middle East	103	(6)
Felicia Hemans's ambivalence	109	(4)
Truth in illustrating Robert Southey and Thomas Moore	113	(5)
Leconte de Lisle: ``Le Desert,'' ``le desert du monde''	118	(7)
Theophile Gautier: the composite desert	125	(5)
``In deserto'': European nature in absentia	130	(6)
Out of the desert: Byron's ``Turkish Tales''	136	(5)
Matthew Arnold in Bukhara: nature in the Middle Eastern city	141	(6)
Alfred Tennyson's Basra: natural phenomena and urban construction	147	(5)
Orientalist poetics, Oscar Wilde	152	(3)
The Orient's art, orienting art	155	(47)
A confederation of the Middle East and art: Wordsworth	155	(2)
The Middle East as a source of art: Leconte de Lisle	157	(7)
Middle Eastern art and Gautier's imagination	164	(7)
Nightingales and roses I: Walter Savage Landor and oriental literature	171	(4)
Nightingales and roses II: Moore and the Orient as an ideal	175	(3)
Hemans's Middle Eastern models	178	(5)
Grounding a poetics in the 1001 Nights: Tennyson	183	(4)
The Orient and Tennyson's p(a)lace of art	187	(5)
Gautier's orientalist poetics and art for art's sake	192	(7)
Orientalist poetics, Oscar Wilde: culmination	199	(3)
Bibliography	202	(14)
Index	216