Late Victorian Orientalism

Late Victorian Orientalism is a work of scholarly research pushing forward disciplines into new areas of enquiry. This collection of essays tries to redefine the task of interpreting the East in the nineteenth century taking as a starting point Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) in order to investigate the visual, fantasised, and imperialist representations of the East as well as the most exemplary translations of Oriental texts. The Victorians envisioned the East in many different modes or Orientalisms since as Said suggested ‘[t]here were, perhaps, as many Orientalisms as Orientalists’. By combining together Western and Oriental modes of art, this study is not only aimed at filling a gap in Victorian and Oriental studies but also at broadening the audiences it is intended for.

More than three decades after its first publication, Edward Said's groundbreaking critique of the West's historical, cultural, and political perceptions of the East has become a modern classic. In this wide-ranging, intellectually vigorous study, Said traces the origins of "orientalism" to the centuries-long period during which Europe dominated the Middle and Near East and, from its position of power, defined "the orient" simply as "other than" the occident. This entrenched view continues to dominate western ideas and, because it does not allow the East to represent itself, prevents true understanding. Essential, and still eye-opening, Orientalism remains one of the most important books written about our divided world.

The Orientalism debate, inspired by the work of Edward Said, has been a major source of cross-disciplinary controversy. This work offers a re-evaluation of this vast literature of Orientalism by a historian of imperalism, giving it a historical perspective

Orientalism and Literature discusses a key critical concept in literary studies and how it assists our reading of literature. It reviews the concept's evolution: how it has been explored, imagined and narrated in literature. Part I considers Orientalism's origins and its geographical and multidisciplinary scope, then considers the major genres and trends Orientalism inspired in the literary-critical field such as the eighteenth-century Oriental tale, reading the Bible, and Victorian Oriental fiction. Part II recaptures specific aspects of Edward Said's Orientalism: the multidisciplinary contexts and scholarly discussions it has inspired (such as colonial discourse, race, resistance, feminism and travel writing). Part III deliberates upon recent and possible future applications of Orientalism, probing its currency and effectiveness in the twenty-first century, the role it has played and continues to play in the operation of power, and how in new forms, neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia, it feeds into various genres, from migrant writing to journalism.

First published in 1998, this volume reflects that, ever since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism twenty years ago, scholars have tested his thesis against the wider application of his terms to cultural practices and the rhetoric of power. The cultural impact of the British on their colonies has been extensively investigated but only recently have scholars begun to ask in what ways British culture was transformed by its contact with the colonies. The essays in this volume demonstrate how influential the Empire was on British culture from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. They show how, from cross-cultural cross-dressing to Buddhism, British artists and writers appropriated unfamiliar and challenging aspects of the culture of the Empire for their own purposes. An examination is also made of the extent to which colonized people engaged in the orientalising discourse, amending and subverting it, even re-applying its stereotypes to the British themselves. Finally, two essays explore instances of the exchange of ideas between colonies. Several of the essays are based on papers given at the 1996 Conference of the College Arts Association.

The Pre-Raphaelites and Orientalism: Language and Cognition in Remediations of the East redefines the task of interpreting the East in the late nineteenth century.

The late Edward Said remains one of the most influential critics and public intellectuals of our time, with lasting contributions to many disciplines. Much of his reputation derives from the phenomenal multidisciplinary influence of his 1978 book Orientalism. Said's seminal polemic analyzes novels, travelogues, and academic texts to argue that a dominant discourse of West over East has warped virtually all past European and American representation of the Near East. But despite the book's wide acclaim, no systematic critical survey of the rhetoric in Said's representation of Orientalism and the resulting impact on intellectual culture has appeared until today. Drawing on the extensive discussion of Said's work in more than 600 bibliographic entries, Daniel Martin Varisco has written an ambitious intellectual history of the debates that Said's work has sparked in several disciplines, highlighting in particular its reception among Arab and European scholars. While pointing out Said's tendency to essentialize and privilege certain texts at the expense of those that do not comfortably it his theoretical framework, Varisco analyzes the extensive commentary the book has engendered in Oriental studies, literary and cultural studies, feminist scholarship, history, political science, and anthropology. He employs "critical satire" to parody the exaggerated and pedantic aspects of post-colonial discourse, including Said's profound underappreciation of the role of irony and reform in many of the texts he cites. The end result is a companion volume to Orientalism and the vast research it inspired. Rather than contribute to dueling essentialisms, Varisco provides a path to move beyond the binary of East versus West and the polemics of blame. Reading Orientalism is the most comprehensive survey of Said's writing and thinking to date. It will be of strong interest to scholars of Middle East studies, anthropology, history, cultural studies, post-colonial studies, and literary studies.

This global environmental and political history “will redefine the way we think about the European colonial project” (Observer). “ . . . sets the triumph of the late 19th-century Western imperialism in the context of catastrophic El Niño weather patterns at that time . . . groundbreaking, mind-stretching.” —The Independent Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites. Davis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants’ lives.