Radical Orientalism: Rights, Reform, and Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)
Cambridge University Press, 7/30/2015
EAN 9781107110328, ISBN10: 1107110327
Hardcover, 280 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm
Language: English
This fascinating study reveals the extent to which the Orientalism of Byron and the Shelleys resonated with the reformist movement of the Romantic era. It documents how and why radicals like Bentham, Cobbett, Carlile, Hone and Wooler, among others in post-Revolutionary Britain, invoked Turkey, North Africa and Mughal India when attacking and seeking to change their government's domestic policies. Examining a broad archive ranging from satires, journalism, tracts, political and economic treatises, and public speeches, to the exotic poetry and fictions of canonical Romanticism, Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud shows that promoting colonization was not Orientalism's sole ideological function. Equally vital was its aesthetic and rhetorical capacity to alienate the people's affection from their rulers and fuel popular opposition to regressive taxation, penal cruelty, police repression, and sexual regulation.
Introduction
radical Orientalism and the rights of man
1. Cruel and unusual romance
Beckford, Byron, and the abomination of violence
2. Reading the Oriental Riot Act
petition, assembly, and Shelley's constitutional sublime
3. Splendors and miseries of the British Sultanate
economic Orientalism, inequality, and radical satire
4. Reasoning like a Turk
indolence and fatalism in Sardanapalus and The Last Man
5. Byronic infidelity and despotic individuality
sex, religion, and free agency
Bibliography.