The Story Of Irish Orientalism

Centuries before W. B. Yeats wove Indian, Japanese, and Irish forms together in his poetry and plays, Irish writers found kinships in Asian and West Asian cultures. This book maps the unacknowledged discourse of Irish Orientalism within Ireland's complex colonial heritage.

Srinivas Aravamudan here reveals how Oriental tales, pseudo-ethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political satires took Europe by storm during the eighteenth century. Naming this body of fiction Enlightenment Orientalism, he poses a range of urgent questions that uncovers the interdependence of Oriental tales and domestic fiction, thereby challenging standard scholarly narratives about the rise of the novel. More than mere exoticism, Oriental tales fascinated ordinary readers as well as intellectuals, taking the fancy of philosophers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot in France, and writers such as Defoe, Swift, and Goldsmith in Britain. Aravamudan shows that Enlightenment Orientalism was a significant movement that criticized irrational European practices even while sympathetically bridging differences among civilizations. A sophisticated reinterpretation of the history of the novel, Enlightenment Orientalism is sure to be welcomed as a landmark work in eighteenth-century studies.

Since its publication in 1939, countless would-be readers of "Finnegans Wake" - James Joyce's masterwork, which consumed a third of his life - have given up after a few pages, dismissing it as a "perverse triumph of the unintelligible." In 1944, a young professor of mythology and literature named Joseph Campbell, working with Henry Morton Robinson, wrote the first "key" or guide to entering the fascinating, disturbing, marvelously rich world of "Finnegans Wake." The authors break down Joyce's "unintelligible" book page by page, stripping the text of much of its obscurity and serving up thoughtful interpretations via footnotes and bracketed commentary. They outline the book's basic action, and then simplify -- and clarify -- its complex web of images and allusions. "A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake" is the latest addition to the "Collected Works of Joseph Campbell" series.

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.

Document from the year 2016 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: A, , language: English, abstract: Irish scholarship and writing is very sensitive when it comes to the issue of the of English Colonization, colonial forces, independence and the matter of the Post-Colonial. In fact a very Irish consciousness is present in almost all the prose works, poems and dramas of this nation, and all writers in this trend, di-rectly or by implication have sought to portray these matters through their works. The paper will endeavour to delve into that consciousness of acclaimed Irish writer James Joyce which attempts to create an alternative cultural identity different from the English by orientalising the Irish sensibilities and moulding it as an opposition to English Imperialism. Borrowing heavily from the theories of Edward Said, and from Edward Soja, Bill Ashcroft et al, the paper will look to illustrate how Joyce “writes back” to the Empire trying to destabilize the colonial culture; yet his identification with the Orient as a Romantic Refuge contrastively crumbles into a place of degeneration, despair and depravity pinpointing James Joyce the—‘The European’s’—ambivalence towards the matter of the Orient: as the boy in Araby is made to realise that escapist fascination is a vain attempt. Focussing on the dissolution of Irish Orientalism into English-French Orientalism, I shall attempt to show how Joyce strove to but failed in transforming Dark Rosaleen into a Gaelic Madonna.

The first monograph-length study of Irish expatriate fiction in an era of transition from American to East Asian global hegemony.

The four pieces that make up this work are taken from Muldoon's Oxford Clarendon Lectures of 1998. Together, they take the form of an A-Z, or abecedary of Irish literature, in which his imagination forges links between disparate aspects and individuals in the Irish literary landscape, ranging back and forth between modern and medieval. From Beckett and Bowen, through MacNeice, Swift and Yeats - and guided throughout by Joyce - To Ireland, I moves lightly through the long grass of Irish writing. The result is a provocative handbook for the literary traveller, who is treated to an astonishing display of scholarship and idiosyncratic inwardness from Irish literature over the course of a millennium.