Images of Empire: ARABIA / ORIENT

To what extent did white European women contribute to the imperial cultures of the second half of the nineteenth century? In contrast to most cultural histories of imperialism which analyze Orientalist images of women rather than imagesbywomen,Gendering Orientalismfocuses on how women themselves contributed. Drawing on the little-known work of Henriette Browne and other "lost" women Orientalist artists and the literary works of George Eliot, Lewis challenges masculinist assumptions relating to the stability and homogeneity of the Orientalist gaze. In order to draw outhowthe meanings attributed to their words and images, as well as t the writers and artists themselves, were specifically gendered, classed and racialized, the author examines women's visual and literary Orientalism through their contemporary reception in the press.

Originally published in 2007, this groundbreaking work is based on detailed and sensitive readings of travel accounts in Persian, dealing with India, Iran and Central Asia between around 1400 and 1800. The first comprehensive treatment of this neglected genre of literature (safar nama), it links the Mughals, Safavids and Central Asia in a crucial period of transformation and cultural contact. The authors' close reading of these travel accounts help us enter the mental and moral worlds of the Muslim and non-Muslim literati who produced these valuable narratives. These accounts are presented in a comparative framework, which sets them side by side with other Asian accounts, as well as early modern European travel narratives, and opens up a rich and unsuspected vista of cultural and material history. This book can be read for a better understanding of the nature of early modern encounters, but also for the sheer pleasure of entering a new world.

Orientalism and Visual Culture is the first sustained analysis of historical exoticism in the nineteenth century. Supplementing the tools of art history with aspects of postcolonial theory, the work of the Frankfurt School, and reception theory, Frederick Bohrer examines the varied reception of the art of ancient Mesopotamia at the time of their archaeological discovery in England, France and Germany. He surveys the full range of visual culture of the time, from museum display, painting and sculpture, to fairs, jewelry, and illustrated magazines, among other media. The representations of Assyria and other ancient cultures are considered in their different national contexts and in connection with differences of class and gender, as well as media of representation. This study analyzes the visual logic of Imperialism, the boundaries of aesthetic evaluation, and the mediation of imagery within the complex forces at play in nineteenth-century Europe.

Christine Peltre considers the romance & exoticism of the Orient, as detailed by 19th century European & American painters. Fascinated by political events in the East, artists from Eugene Delacroix to Kandinsky & Klee, all sought to shape & document their own versions of the history of the Orient.

"The reductive and essentialist Western view of the Islamic Orient in the nineteenth century exerted a powerful influence on British travelers to the East. However, the experience of travel in the Orient made some popular travel writers - James Morier, Alexander Kinglake, Richard Burton, and Gertrude Bell - uneasy with this view of the "other". Even as they subscribed to this reductive view of the Orient, their personal encounter with the "other" and the physical and psychological displacement caused by their travel experience led them to question and even challenge their culture's assumptions of the Orient. Their shifting perception of the "other" reveals all the tensions and influences of their personal backgrounds and their historical and political milieu. By analyzing these aspects, this book argues for a more nuanced and hybrid approach to the understanding of the relationship between the West and the Islamic Orient." "Viewing the Islamic Orient: British Travel Writers of the Nineteenth Century will be of particular interest to scholars of comparative literature and Middle Eastern and Islamic studies."--BOOK JACKET.

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