Victorian Days and The Arabian Nights (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Fiction of Gothic Egypt and British Imperial Paranoia: The Curse of the Suez Canal
English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 2011
This article is an examination of the relationship between the development of Egyptian-themed gothic fiction and Anglo-Egyptian colonial relations in the late-Victorian period. It argues that the increasingly pivotal role played by the Suez Canal in the smooth operation of the British Empire was a key impetus for the emergence of this paranoid body of literature. Since its completion in 1869, the canal had quickly become the lifeline of the empire, with Britain unofficially occupying Egypt in 1882 to ensure unrestricted access. The unstable status of Egypt following this move quickly became an ongoing source of national and international controversy, commonly known as ‘the Egyptian Question’, which was to plague British foreign policy over the ensuing decades. And contemporaneously a subgenre of Egyptian-themed gothic fiction began to grow in popularity, within which concerns over the Egyptian situation tended to find fictional expression in the form of the supernatural invader. From the canal’s opening in 1869, and gaining further momentum after the 1882 occupation, dozens of tales positing the irruption of vengeful, supernatural, ancient Egyptian forces in civilised, rational, modern England began to appear. The most extreme of these is Pharos the Egyptian (1899), a narrative of retributive mass extermination by the Anglo-Australian author Guy Boothby. The theme recurs in texts by other notable fin-de-siècle popular authors such as Bram Stoker, Richard Marsh, and Arthur Conan Doyle, and in a host of lesser-known short stories, signalling clearly that the significance of the Egyptian Question was not lost on popular authors or their audiences. The article reads these fictional narratives contrapuntally alongside popular non-fictional accounts of Anglo-Egyptian affairs, such as those of prominent Daily Mail foreign correspondent G. W. Steevens, to allow the reciprocal relationship between the political situation and the fictional subgenre to emerge.
The Thousand and One Nights: Sources and Transformations in Literature, Art, and Science, 2020
The Arabian Nights, Arab-European Literary Influence, and the Lineages of the Novel
Modern Language Quarterly, 2007
Rebecca Carol Johnson is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at Yale University. Her research focuses on the development of Arabic and European novels as an inquiry into the global circulation of form. Her interests also include the poetics, politics, and practice of translation. Her translation of Sinan Antoon's novel, I'jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody, is forthcoming. Richard Maxwell teaches comparative literature at Yale University. He is author of The Mysteries of Paris and London (1992) and editor of The Victorian Illustrated Book (2002), Charles Dickens's Tale of Two Cities (2003), and, with Katie Trumpener, The Cambridge Companion to Fiction of the Romantic Period (forthcoming). He is working on a study of historical fiction from 1660 to the present. His essay “Pretenders in Sanctuary” appeared in the June 2000 issue of MLQ. Katie Trumpener is professor of comparative literature and English at Yale University. Her first book, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic No...
The Influence of the Arabian Nights on English Literature: A Selective Study
Abstract This article traces and discusses the ways in which the Arabian Nights has inspired English authors to write with an awareness of cultural and Arabian Orientalism. The Arabian Nights has been very popular with the Western readership like the contemporary stories of Harry Potter. Arabian tales were the fairy godmother of English novel. The Arabian Nights has been both a shaping influence on and an instance of malleable Oriental literary material for the British/Western creative writers. In the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the themes of Arabian Nights became a fertile pasture for budding English writers to draw onward debate. The Arabian Nights deserves particular attention as it was the first Romantic work of prose-fiction promoting Orientalism. This paper draws on the influence of the Nights on the production of English literature. Besides, on a scholarly level, the translation of the Eastern religious and literary works into English by such scholars as James Atkinson, Edward William Lane, William Gibb, Richard Burton, and Godferey Higgins prompted a deeper understanding of the Arabian civilization. This paper aims to examine the influence of the Arabian Nights in terms of the major impacts that have helped such English writer to compose a literary work.
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2015
as following in the footsteps of al-Muqtataf by popularizing not only science but also Qur anic exegesis. Chapter 6 documents the key role played by Darwin and evolution in the emergence of socialism at the turn of the century. Elshakry shows that Marx has been incorrectly assigned a prominent role in Arab socialism of the period-for Arab intellectuals, much like many colonials, socialism was more closely tied to Darwin and the notion of gradual social evolution than to radical Marxist revolution. In the final chapter, Elshakry focuses on Isma il Mazhar, the first translator of Darwin's Origin of Species. She places his choice of words to translate key aspects of Darwin's text within the historical discourse on Darwin, changing social and political realities, and Mazhar's own concerted effort to provide classical Arabic genealogies to Darwin's thought without shirking its novelty. Mazhar is also shown to be the last of a generation of Arab elite intellectuals to enthusiastically "take on the mantle of scientific positivism, cultural evolution, and social progress under the name of Darwin" (p. 264). The book closes with an afterword comparing the contemporary valence of Darwin in Egypt to that of this earlier period and the different sociopolitical contexts that undergird contemporary discussions. Some readers will undoubtedly be frustrated by the book's lack of diacritical marks, particularly as this results in some erroneous transliterations: for example, ada instead of a da , or na w instead of naw-the latter is even stated to stem from the root "n-w" (p. 263)! This issue does not, however, affect the substance of the argument. With Reading Darwin in Arabic, Elshakry has produced not only the most definitive study of the Arabic reception of Darwin, but also one of the most unified analyses of the various social, political, and intellectual developments in the Middle East during this period. I have no doubt that this book will inform the work of scholars working on the modern Middle East for decades to come.
The Orientalist Readings of The Arabian Nights
MA in Translation Studies, University of Allameh Tabataba'i ABSTRAC: Review of the related literature shows that Orientalism is a centuries-long project which aims to create a dichotomy between the Occident and the Orient for the purpose of consolidating the supremacy of the former over the latter. This project contributed in shaping an image of the Orient that provided the western powers with the academic justification on which to base their hegemony. The present paper is an attempt to show how translation and literature can ideologically produce a system of representations in favor of a specific culture. On this basis, we have analyzed Richard Burrton's English translation of The Arabian Nights (1885) to show its cultivation of stereotypes about the Eastern culture and about Islam in particular. Our analysis shows that it is indeed a part of the Orientalist as well as the postcolonial project that instead of bridging differences, serves to consolidate ideologically-motivated stereotypes about the East, widen differences and further alienate the Other.
Prestige, Prudence and Public Opinion in the 1882 British Occupation of Egypt
Australian Journal of Politics & History, 2010
This article challenges both the "gentlemanly capitalist" thesis and "official mind" interpretation of the 1882 British occupation of Egypt. The former fails to adequately consider the political character of the Anglo-French financial Control overturned by the Urabist revolt in February 1882. The latter overstates the significance of the Suez Canal as both trigger and justification for military intervention. The article argues that the primary motivation behind the Egyptian occupation was the vindication of British prestige, vis-à-vis the Continental Powers, but especially in India and in the "East" by suppressing the threat to "civilised" order posed by the Urabist revolt. The protection of the Suez Canal and British financial and trade interests were secondary and derivative.
AN ANALYSIS OF THE BRITISH INVASION OF EGYPT (1882) THROUGH THE LENS OF VICTORIAN PARTY POLITICS
Turkish Journal of History, 2019
The British occupation of Egypt in 1882 meant a breakaway from the Anglo-French entente's control over Ottoman financial system and the end of the Liberal Government's 'reluctant' imperialism. When the Liberal ministry began in 1880, the cabinet immediately focused on foreign policies towards the Ottoman Empire subsequent to Gladstone's campaign during the Bulgarian Agitation which had already turned out to be a party question. The protection of the Suez Canal as well as the interests of the British bondholders and the prestige of the British Empire was vital, which united the Liberal ministry and the Conservatives under the same purpose. Despite late Ottoman approval, the occupation signified the edge of Anglo-Ottoman alliance during the nineteenth century. This study will analyse why the Egyptian question is important for British party politics and to what extend the Anglo-Ottoman relations was affected with these circumstances.
Eighteenth-Century Orientalism in Contemporary British Historiography and Literary Criticism
To speak about orientalism now is to explain the persistent concern, among academic and non-academic readers and writers alike, with the transformative effect of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). Said’s text has been taken as a challenge by historians of society and of literature alike. To these scholars, the book of- fered a vast new field of inquiry into the relationship between European and colonial history, between cultural production and capitalism, and between Enlightenment idealism and the politics of domination. Orientalism was also a particular model of interpretive methodology, which repurposed Orientalism, once a term for cultural appreciation and interest, to name a relationship of mistrust, abuse, and control. We show in this essay that Said’s argument about the inextricable ties between Europe and its colonial domains has been so deeply absorbed as an intellectual, ethical, and political imperative that no serious scholarship is now imaginable that remains unaware of imperialism as a formative element of European history and culture. As a model of interpretive methodology, Said’s work has been subjected to some of the most poignant and compelling criticisms, especially by contemporary British historiography and literary criticism working on the eighteenth-century period and whose purpose and effect have been to expand and improve the examination and understanding of imperialism and the enduring practices and implications of imperial culture. What has perplexed eighteenth-century scholars and then encouraged them to take up the question of Orientalism was the fact that Said largely omitted periods prior to Bonaparte’s expedition in Egypt in 1798 and provided a monolithic and hegemonic version of Orientalism as discursive formation, transport- able and translatable to any given time and place. Scholars of the eighteenth-century period, and more particularly, given the scope of Said’s research, those working in the fields of the history of empire and in literary criticism, have been keen to respond to the Orientalist challenge. This allowed them not only to embrace the Saidian perspective and revisit the corpus of eighteenth-century literature through the Orientalist prism but also, at a second stage perhaps, to refine and adapt the concept of Orientalism to time and place specifics and display a more anxious history of empire. The re-reading of European textual materials with an eye to Orientalism has been (and continues to be) enabling of historicist understandings of literary representation and its potentially collusive relation- ship with the histories of colonialism. Developments in colonial historiography and related fields such as historical anthropology have made possible new insights into the relationship between eighteenth- century English literature and empire. Orientalism also provided an analytical frame to think about matters related to the construction of tropes, the transformation of Eastern texts as they traveled across countries and continents, the promotion and demotion of genres, the question of canon formation, the birth of the “English” novel, gender, and the impact of other forces than empire, such as the book market, in determining Orientalist fashions.