The Sheikh S Wayward Wife

Layla has been cursed with terrible luck ever since she decided to fly to the desert nation of Al Ankhara in search of the father she never knew. After their reunion, her father tricks her, locks her up in his estate and gives her away, as if she’s an object, to be married to an unknown enemy! But it’s not like Layla to give up easily. She manages to escape her guard and make a run for it, until she’s spotted by none other than the handsome and haughty Sheikh Halil.

The Sheik—E. M. Hull’s best-selling novel that became a wildly popular film starring Rudolph Valentino—kindled “sheik fever” across the Western world in the 1920s. A craze for all things romantically “Oriental” swept through fashion, film, and literature, spawning imitations and parodies without number. While that fervor has largely subsided, tales of passion between Western women and Arab men continue to enthrall readers of today’s mass-market romance novels. In this groundbreaking cultural history, Hsu-Ming Teo traces the literary lineage of these desert romances and historical bodice rippers from the twelfth to the twenty-first century and explores the gendered cultural and political purposes that they have served at various historical moments. Drawing on “high” literature, erotica, and popular romance fiction and films, Teo examines the changing meanings of Orientalist tropes such as crusades and conversion, abduction by Barbary pirates, sexual slavery, the fear of renegades, the Oriental despot and his harem, the figure of the powerful Western concubine, and fantasies of escape from the harem. She analyzes the impact of imperialism, decolonization, sexual liberation, feminism, and American involvement in the Middle East on women’s Orientalist fiction. Teo suggests that the rise of female-authored romance novels dramatically transformed the nature of Orientalism because it feminized the discourse; made white women central as producers, consumers, and imagined actors; and revised, reversed, or collapsed the binaries inherent in traditional analyses of Orientalism.

She can save her marriage--by getting pregnant! A year has passed since Leona left her husband, Sheikh Hassan ben Khalifa Al-Qadim. She misses him very much, but what was the point of staying when she'd failed to deliver the one thing Hassan needed--a child and heir? When Hassan tricks her into returning to him, Leona is furious and puzzled. Why does he want her by his side again and back in his bed?

Can love triumph when it's held hostage by culture clash? Meet three irresistible desert princes who have it all--looks, charm, wealth and sexiness to spare. When three captivating, desirable Western beauties enter their lives--spirited, independent, defiant women so utterly unlike those from their homeland--how can they fail to fall for them, and fall hard? But a sheikh is accustomed to getting everything he wants on his own terms. And love can't be won that way--it must be earned, not commanded. Prepare to be swept away by the blazing heat and breathtaking passion of desert romance at its finest in three riveting stories by top selling Harlequin Presents author Sandra Marton. Bundle includes: The Sheikh's Defiant Bride, The Sheikh's Wayward Wife and The Sheikh's Rebellious Mistress.

This book, the first full-length cross-period comparison of medieval and modern literature, offers cutting edge research into the textual and cultural legacy of the Middle Ages: a significant and growing area of scholarship. At the juncture of literary, cultural and gender studies, and capitalizing on a renewed interest in popular western representations of the Islamic east, this book proffers innovative case studies on representations of cross-religious and cross-cultural romantic relationships in a selection of late medieval and twenty-first century Orientalist popular romances. Comparing the tropes, characterization and settings of these literary phenomena, and focusing on gender, religion, and ethnicity, the study exposes the historical roots of current romance representations of the east, advancing research in Orientalism, (neo)medievalism and medieval cultural studies. Fundamentally, Representing Difference invites a closer look at medieval and modern popular attitudes towards the east, as represented in romance, and the kinds of solutions proposed for its apparent problems.