Richard Pococke S Letters From The East 1737 1740

In Richard Pococke’s Letters from the East (1737-1740), Rachel Finnegan provides edited transcripts of the full run of correspondence from Richard Pococke’s famous eastern voyage from 1737-40, together with updated biographical accounts of the author and his correspondents (his mother, Elizabeth Pococke and his uncle and patron, Bishop Thomas Milles).

The age of Enlightenment – the so-called age of reason – was also, paradoxically, the age of the Eleusinian mysteries. By attempting to reveal Demeter's secret cult, British, French, and German thinkers and freemasons of the eighteenth century revealed more than they bargained for: the pagan origins of Christian doctrines such as the Trinity and the afterlife, and through the mythical gift of law and agriculture to Eleusis an alternative narrative of the origins of civilisation to that found in the Bible.

The Life and Works of Robert Wood (1717-1771) commemorates the Irish classicist and traveller on the 250th anniversary of his death and provides the general reader with a source book for the fascinating life and career of a much-neglected figure in the realm of Irish eighteenth-century travels and antiquarianism.

In English Explorers in the East (1738-1745). The Travels of Thomas Shaw, Charles Perry and Richard Pococke, Rachel Finnegan examines the influential travel writings of three rival explorers, whose eastern travel books were printed within a decade of each other.

The Arabian Nights is a composite work consisting of popular stories originally transmitted orally and developed during several centuries, with material added somewhat haphazardly at different periods and places. This study was devoted to the impact of The Arabian Nights on four novelists of the nineteenth century: Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Meredith, and Robert Louis Stevenson. These authors were selected on the ground of their life spans, which encompassed almost the whole century. Because they are among the masters of the English novel, it is reasonable to assume that they did not content themselves with mere imitations resulting in pseudo-oriental tales. Their original creations assimilated the influences from The Arabian Nights, forming new unified structures with interwoven references and allusions, which are to be redetected.

This is the first issue of the Writer and Their Work series to present an appreciation of a group, as opposed to a single writer. Great Britain has, for at least three centuries, sent a notable series of travellers to the Near East. Their work is critically examined in this essay by Mr Robin Fedden, who writes: 'The Near east is an area indeterminate and not easily defined. For my purposes it includes Arabia; it is bounded on the west by the Nile Valley, and on the east by the deserts that separate Damascus from the Euphrates. Others might set different limits. What, again, constitutes a 'traveller'? Those found here are chosen for literary talent rather than the extent of their peregrinations. I thus include an invalid in Egypt, an ambassador's wife in Constantinople, and (though war is hardly travel) T. E. Lawrence could not be left out.' Robin Fedden's sections on Kinglake and Doughty are particularly valuable, and he has much of interest to say on the work of contemporary writers such as Freya Stark and St. John Philby.