Orientalism Edward Saids evaluation and critique of the set of beliefs known as Orientalism forms an important background for

postcolonial studies. His work highlights the inaccuracies of a wide variety of assumptions as it questions various paradigms of thought which are accepted on individual, academic, and political levels. The Terms The Orient signifies a system of representations framed by political forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and Western empire. The Orient exists for the West, and is constructed by and in relation to the West. It is a mirror image of what is inferior and alien (Other) to the West. Orientalism is a manner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient. It is the image of the Orient expressed as an entire system of thought and scholarship. The Oriental is the person represented by such thinking. The man is depicted as feminine, weak, yet strangely dangerous because his sexuality poses a threat to white, Western women. The woman is both eager to be dominated and strikingly exotic. The Oriental is a single image, a sweeping generalization, and a stereotype that crosses countless cultural and national boundaries. Latent Orientalism is the unconscious, untouchable certainty about what the Orient is. Its basic content is static and unanimous. The Orient is seen as separate, eccentric, backward, silently different, sensual, and passive. It has a tendency towards despotism and away from progress. It displays feminine penetrability and supine malleability. Its progress and value are judged in terms of, and in comparison to, the West, so it is always the Other, the conquerable, and the inferior. Manifest Orientalism is what is spoken and acted upon. It includes information and changes in knowledge about the Orient as well as policy decisions founded in Orientalist thinking. It is the expression in words and actions of Latent Orientalism. Earlier Orientalism The first Orientalists were 19th century scholars who translated the writings of the Orient into English, based on the assumption that a truly effective colonial conquest

required knowledge of the conquered peoples. This idea of knowledge as power is present throughout Saids critique. By knowing the Orient, the West came to own it. The Orient became the studied, the seen, the observed, the object; Orientalist scholars were the students, the seers, the observers, the subject. The Orient was passive; the West was active. One of the most significant constructions of Orientalist scholars is that of the Orient itself. What is considered the Orient is a vast region, one that spreads across a myriad of cultures and countries. It includes most of Asia as well as the Middle East. The depiction of this single Orient which can be studied as a cohesive whole is one of the most powerful accomplishments of Orientalist scholars. It essentializes an image of a prototypical Oriental a biological inferior that is culturally backward, peculiar, and unchanging to be depicted in dominating and sexual terms. The discourse and visual imagery of Orientalism is laced with notions of power and superiority, formulated initially to facilitate a colonizing mission on the part of the West and perpetuated through a wide variety of discourses and policies. The language is critical to the construction. The feminine and weak Orient awaits the dominance of the West; it is a defenseless and unintelligent whole that exists for, and in terms of, its Western counterpart. The importance of such a construction is that it creates a single subject matter where none existed, a compilation of previously unspoken notions of the Other. Since the notion of the Orient is created by the Orientalist, it exists solely for him or her. Its identity is defined by the scholar who gives it life. Contemporary Orientalism Said argues that Orientalism can be found in current Western depictions of Arab cultures. The depictions of the Arab as irrational, menacing, untrustworthy, antiWestern, dishonest, and perhaps most importantly prototypical, are ideas into which Orientalist scholarship has evolved. These notions are trusted as foundations for both ideologies and policies developed by the Occident. Said writes: The hold these instruments have on the mind is increased by the institutions built around them. For every Orientalist, quite literally, there is a support system of staggering power, considering the ephemerality of the myths that Orientalism propagates. The system now culminates into the very institutions of the state. To write about the Arab Oriental world, therefore, is to write with the authority of a nation, and

not with the affirmation of a strident ideology but with the unquestioning certainty of absolute truth backed by absolute force. He continues, One would find this kind of procedure less objectionable as political propaganda which is what it is, of course were it not accompanied by sermons on the objectivity, the fairness, the impartiality of a real historian, the implication always being that Muslims and Arabs cannot be objective but that Orientalists writing about Muslims are, by definition, by training, by the mere fact of their Westernness. This is the culmination of Orientalism as a dogma that not only degrades its subject matter but also blinds its practitioners. Saids Project Said calls into question the underlying assumptions that form the foundation of Orientalist thinking. A rejection of Orientalism entails a rejection of biological generalizations, cultural constructions, and racial and religious prejudices. It is a rejection of greed as a primary motivating factor in intellectual pursuit. It is an erasure of the line between the West and the Other. Said argues for the use of narrative rather than vision in interpreting the geographical landscape known as the Orient, meaning that a historian and a scholar would turn not to a panoramic view of half of the globe, but rather to a focused and complex type of history that allows space for the dynamic variety of human experience. Rejection of Orientalist thinking does not entail a denial of the differences between the West and the Orient, but rather an evaluation of such differences in a more critical and objective fashion. The Orient cannot be studied in a non-Orientalist manner; rather, the scholar is obliged to study more focused and smaller culturally consistent regions. The person who has until now been known as the Oriental must be given a voice. Scholarship from afar and second-hand representation must take a back seat to narrative and self-representation on the part of the Oriental. Author: Danielle Sered, Fall 1996 http://postcolonialstudies.emory.edu/orientalism/ Tags: Asia, Europe, Identity, Race

Read more: http://postcolonialstudies.emory.edu/orientalism/#ixzz2lfHqGGAw

Orientalism: a Brief Definition Edward Said

[From Orientalism, New York: Vintage, 1979.] Unlike the Americans, the French and British--less so the Germans, Russians, Spanish, Portugese, Italians, and Swiss--have had a long tradition of what I shall be calling Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in European Western Experience. The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles. . . . It will be clear to the reader...that by Orientalism I mean several things, all of them, in my opinion, interdependent. The most readily accepted designation for Orientalism is an academic one, and indeed the label still serves in a number of academic institutions. Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient--and this applies whether the persion is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist--either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she says or does is Orientalism. . . . Related to this academic tradition, whose fortunes, transmigrations, specializations, and transmissions are in part the subject of this study, is a more general meaning for Orientalism. Orientalism is a style of thought based upon ontological and epistemological distinction made between "the Orient" and (most of the time) "the Occident." Thus a very large mass of writers, among who are poet, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, "mind," destiny, and so on. . . . the

phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient . . despite or beyond any corrsespondence, or lack thereof, with a "real" Orient. (1-3,5) http://www.postcolonialweb.org/poldiscourse/pol11.html

The Norton Anthology of English Literature Norton Topics Online The Romantic Period: Topics Romantic Orientalism: Overview "Romantic Orientalism" the second term sometimes expanded to "Oriental exoticism" or "Oriental fantasy" brings together two concepts that continue to be much in dispute among theorists and literary historians. For practical purposes, "Romantic" here refers to the writers (and the ideas and culture they reflect) of the Romantic Period section of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, where the dates are given as 17851830. "Orientalism" refers to the geography and culture of large parts of Asia and North Africa, plus some of what we now think of as Eastern Europe. Above all, from a British point of view, "Orientalism" connotes foreignness or otherness things decidedly not British and it sometimes seems as if the "East" signified by "Orient" is not only what is east of Europe and the Mediterranean but everything east of the English Channel. In literary history, Romantic Orientalism is the recurrence of recognizable elements of Asian and African place names, historical and legendary people, religions, philosophies, art, architecture, interior decoration, costume, and the like in the writings of the British Romantics. At first glance, Romantic literature may seem to be divided between the natural settings of sheep fields in the southwest of England or the Lake District and the unnatural settings of medieval castles that are, for all their remoteness from present-day reality, always Christian and at least European, if not always British. But a closer look reveals a tiger decidedly not indigenous to the British Isles in one of Blake's most famous songs; an impressive dream of "an Arab of the Bedouin Tribes" in book 5 of Wordsworth's Prelude; the founder of the Mongol dynasty in China as well as an Abyssinian "damsel with a dulcimer" in Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"; Eastern plots, characters, and themes in Byron's "Oriental tales," some of which show up later in Don Juan; a poet's journey into the innermost reaches of the Caucasus (the legendary boundary between Europe and Asia) in Percy Shelley's Alastor; a tempting affair with an Indian maiden in Keats's "Endymion" and a feast of "dainties" from Fez, Samarcand, and Lebanon in "The Eve of St. Agnes"; an Arab maiden, Safie, as the most liberated character in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Orientalism, via the literature and art of the

time, was increasingly in the air (as well as the texts) in both London and the British countryside. The Orientalism of British Romantic literature has roots in the first decade of the eighteenth century, with the earliest translations of The Arabian Nights into English (from a version in French, 170508). The popularity of The Arabian Nights inspired writers to develop a new genre, the Oriental tale, of which Samuel Johnson'sHistory of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759) is the best mid-century example (NAEL 8, 1.2680 2743). Romantic Orientalism continues to develop into the nineteenth century, paralleling another component of Romanticism already presented in the Norton Web sites, "Literary Gothicism." Two of the authors here Clara Reeve and William Beckford are important figures in the history of both movements. Like Gothic novels and plays, Oriental tales feature exotic settings, supernatural happenings, and deliberate extravagance of event, character, behavior, emotion, and speech an extravagance sometimes countered by wry humor even to the point of buffoonery. It is as though the "otherness" of Oriental settings and characters gives the staid British temperament a holiday. Gothicism and Orientalism do the work of fiction more generally providing imaginary characters, situations, and stories as alternative to, even as escape from, the reader's everyday reality. But they operate more sensationally than other types of fiction. Pleasurable terror and pleasurable exoticism are kindred experiences, with unreality and strangeness at the root of both. Before the publication of Edward Said's extremely influential and controversial Orientalism (1978), scholars tended to view the Eastern places, characters, and events pervading late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British literature as little more than stimuli for easy thrills. But this attitude has changed dramatically. Along with its well-studied interests in the inner workings of the mind, connections with nature, and exercise of a transcendental imagination, the Romantic Period in Britain is now recognized as a time of global travel and exploration, accession of colonies all over the world, and development of imperialist ideologies that rationalized the British takeover of distant territories. In the introduction to their fine collection of essays in Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 17801834(1996), Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh notice references to the Spanish "discovery" and penetration of the Americas, British colonial wars, and "ethnographic exoticism" in several shorter pieces of Lyrical Ballads (1798) and connect the Ancient Mariner's voyage to a "growing

maritime empire of far-flung islands, trading-posts, and stretches of coastline on five continents." Wordsworth and Coleridge were more aware of British expansionism than we had realized. Such recontextualizing of Romantic Orientalism gives it a decidedly contemporary and political character involving questions of national identity, cultural difference, the morality of imperialist domination, and consequent anxiety and guilt concerning such issues. A handy example is the call for papers at an international conference on the topic at Gregynog, Wales, in July 2002, whose focus is "the cultural, political, commercial, and aesthetic dimensions of the synchronous growth of Romanticism and Orientalism. The European Romantic imagination was saturated with Orientalism, but it reflected persistent ambivalence concerning the East, complicated in Britain by colonial anxiety and imperial guilt. We shall consider how Western notions of cultural hegemony were bolstered by imperial rhetoric and challenged by intercultural translation." As a spate of new books and articles attests, a political approach to Romantic Orientalism is currently one of the major enterprises among critics and theorists. Colonial anxiety and imperial guilt may not be immediately apparent in the extracts assembled for this online topic, from Frances Sheridan's History of Nourjahad, Sir Willliam Jones's Palace of Fortune and Hymn to Narayena, Clara Reeve's History of Charoba, Queen of gypt, William Beckford's Vathek, W. S. Landor's Gebir, Robert Southey's Curse of Kehama, Byron's Giaour, and Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh. But the texts are representative of the materials that scholars are currently working with, and three of them the works by Sheridan, Beckford, and Byron have recently been reprinted in a New Riverside Edition, Three Oriental Tales (2002), with an introduction and notes by Alan Richardson pointing out the works' "use of Oriental' motifs to criticize European social arrangements." The texts and additional background materials included in this topic enhance the reading of canonical Romantic poems and fictions, as well as suggest how those poems and fictions connect with the political and social concerns of their real-life historical contexts. http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/romantic/topic_4/

Orientalism International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences | 2008 | Copyright Orientalism BIBLIOGRAPHY Orientalism refers principally to the academic study during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries of the peoples, languages, and cultures of North Africa, the Middle East, and, to a lesser degree, South Asia. In art history, the term refers to a school of European painters of the nineteenth century who took the peoples of these regions as their primary subjects. Since the publication of Edward Saids (19352003) widely influential study titled simply Orientalism (1978), the term has become pejorative, suggesting a critical orientation or mode of representation that privileges the Western over the Eastern or idealizes the East in a manner that reflects European desires and political and economic interests. What is called, after Said, orientalist discourse, developed during the era of most active European colonialism, from the early 1800s to World War I (19141918). Among the first important works accurately called orientalist were those produced by figures associated with colonialist endeavors in North Africa and the Middle East, including the massive, twenty-four-volume Description de lgypte, produced by approximately 160 scholars who accompanied Napolon Bonaparte (17691821) on his ultimately failed expedition to conquer Egypt in 1798. The Description, completed in 1829, is typically orientalist in, on the one hand, the idealization of Egyptian people and places in its many beautifully rendered images, and, on the other, its overall concern with defining and classifying all the cultural and physical aspects of Egypt toward the ultimate objective of controlling its people and natural resources. The nineteenth century can rightly be called the orientalist era in the arts, as works across the spectrum of literature and painting drew on the myth of the Orient that was being produced by the functionaries of colonialism and the scholars of philology. While French painters such as Eugne Delacroix (17981863) and Jean-Lon Grme (1824 1904) are widely regarded as the preeminent orientalists in the visual arts, the movement was widespread and included Frederick Arthur Bridgman (American, 1847 1928), Frederick Goodall (British, 18221904), Louis-Joseph Anthonissen (Belgian, 18491913), Ludwig Deutsch (German, 18551935), and Leopold Carl Mller

(Austrian, 18341892). Orientalist literary artists include Rudyard Kipling (1865 1936), Edgar Allan Poe (18091849), Joseph Conrad (18571924), and Arthur Rimbaud (18541891), to list only a very few. Muslim women were a particular focus of orientalist artists. The slave market, harem, and bath received seemingly endless treatments. Grmes images characteristically give the impression of the voyeur who has lifted or pulled back the veil to reveal the hidden mystery of the Orient. Womens bodies are erotically on display, often, in fact, under examination by some Arab buyer or slave trader. The precise response of a European audience to such images is difficult to ascertain, but generally the erotic construction of an Arab other appealed to a patriarchal sense of superiority and interest in control. The matters of the European sense of superiority and interest in control can also be seen in orientalist scholarship. Non-Western societies were described as backward and barbaric, fundamentally incapable of social, political, or technological modernization. An important point is that the works of orientalist scholars were often not intentionally or explicitly motivated toward the interests of Western power. The assumptions of superiority and control were embedded in the scholarship, often despite the fact that an individual scholar might regard his or her subject very sympathetically. However, it is certainly true that whatever the disposition of the orientalist scholar, his or her work was a critical part of the general body of knowledge that facilitated and justified the control and exploitation of colonized peoples. The publication in 1978 of Saids study unleashed a fierce and continuing debate. The debate is wide ranging and contains multiple positions, though it can be roughly divided between two groups. Some believe Saids work has overly politicized the academic study of non-Western peoples and unfairly characterized the work of devoted scholars. Others, particularly the generation of scholars who pursued their graduate work in the later 1980s and 1990s, hold that Saids work is a particularly valuable contribution to the broad examination of the ideological assumptions and effects of intellectual works that purport to be disinterested. Whatever the multiple positions in this rich debate, the influence of Saids volume has been tremendous.Orientalism has been translated into at least thirty-six languages, including Hebrew and Vietnamese, gone through multiple editions, and is certainly one

of the most cited works in the humanities and social sciences since 1978. The critique of orientalist work is at the center of entire new disciplines, such as postcolonial studies, which is concerned with the struggle of non-Western peoples to meaningfully represent themselves and their social, political, and cultural concerns to both Western and nonWestern audiences and institutions. SEE ALSO Colonialism; Gaze, Colonial; Imperialism; Other, The; Postcolonialism; Racism; Representation in Postcolonial Analysis; Said, Edward BIBLIOGRAPHY Irwin, Robert. 2006. Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents. Woodstock, NY: Overlook. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Turner, Bryan S. 1994. Orientalism, Postmodernism, and Globalism. New York: Routledge. http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Orientalism.aspx

Orientalism is the study of Near and Far Eastern societies and cultures, languages, and peoples by Western scholars. It can also refer to the imitation or depiction of aspects of Eastern cultures in the West by writers, designers, and artists. The former has come to acquire negative connotations in some quarters and is interpreted to refer to the study of the East by Westerners influenced by the attitudes of the era of European imperialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When used in this sense, it implies oldfashioned and prejudiced outsider interpretations of Eastern cultures and peoples, allowing frequent misunderstanding of their cultural, ethical, and religious beliefs. However, with the rise of a global economy and communications, greater understanding and exchange are taking place between both Eastern and Western cultures, leading to the promotion of a one world family and contributing to a lasting peace in the world. Contents

1 Meaning of the term 2 History of Orientalism 3 Orientalism and the arts

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3.1 Imitations of Oriental styles 3.2 Depictions of the Orient in art and literature

4 Edward Said and "Orientalism"

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4.1 Criticisms of Said 4.2 Supporters of Said and his influence

5 Eastern views and adaptations of the West 6 Notes 7 References 8 External links 9 Credits Meaning of the term Orientalism derives from a Latin word oriens meaning "east" (literally "rising sun"). This is the opposite of the term Occident. In terms of the Old World, Europe was

considered to be "The West" or Occidental, and the furthest known Eastern extremity was "The East" or "The Orient." Over time, the common understanding of "the Orient" has continually shifted East as Western explorers traveled deeper into Asia. From as early as the Roman Empire until at least the Middle Ages, what is now considered "the Middle East" was then considered "the Orient." In Biblical times, the Three Wise Men "from the Orient" were probably Magi from the Persian Empire or Arabia which are east relative to Israel. Westerners' location of "The Orient" continually shifted eastwards, until the Pacific Ocean was reached, the region which is now known as "the Far East." However, there still remain some contexts where "the Orient" or "Oriental" refer to older definitions. For example, "Oriental spices" typically come from regions extending from the Middle East through the Indiansub-continent to Indo-China. Also, travel on the Orient Express (from Paris to Istanbul), is eastward bound (towards the sunrise), but does not reach what is currently understood to be "the Orient." Furthermore, the English word "Oriental" is usually a synonym for the peoples, cultures, and goods from the parts of East Asia traditionally occupied by East Asians and Southeast Asians, categorized by the racial label "Mongoloid." This would exclude Indians, Arabs, and other more westerly peoples. In some parts of America it is considered derogatory to use "Orientals" to refer to East Asians. For example, inWashington state it is illegal to use the word "oriental" in legislation and government documents.[1] History of Orientalism It is difficult to be precise about the origin of the distinction between the "West" and the "East," which did not appear as a polarity before the oriens/occidens divided administration of the Roman Empire under Diocletian. However, sharp opposition arose between the rising European Christendom and Muslim cultures to the East and in North Africa. During the Middle Ages Islamic peoples were the "alien" enemies of the Christian world. European knowledge of cultures further to the East was very sketchy, although there was a vague awareness that complex civilizations existed in India and China, from which luxury goods such as woven silk textiles and ceramics were imported. As European explorations and colonizations expanded, a distinction emerged

between non-literate peoples, for example in Africa and the Americas, and the literate cultures of the East. In the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, thinkers sometimes characterized aspects of Eastern cultures as superior to the Christian West. For example Voltaire promoted research into Zoroastrianism in the belief that it would support a rational Deism superior to Christianity. Others praised the relative religious tolerance of Islamic countries in contrast with the Christian West, or the status of scholarship in Mandarin China. With the translation of the Avesta by Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil Duperron and the discovery of the Indo-European languages by William Jones, complex connections between the early history of Eastern and Western cultures emerged. However, these developments occurred in the context of rivalry between France and Britain for control of India, and it is sometimes claimed that knowledge was associated with attempts to understand colonized cultures in order to control them more effectively. Liberal economists such as James Mill denigrated Eastern countries on the grounds that their civilizations were static and corrupt. Karl Marx characterized the "Asiatic mode of production" as unchanging due to the narrowness of the village communities and the productive role of the state, hence he stated that the system of British colonialismunconsciously prepared future revolutions in India by destroying this mode of production. The first serious European studies of Buddhism and Hinduism were undertaken by scholars such as Eugene Burnouf and Max Mller. In this period serious study of Islam also emerged. By the mid-nineteenth century Oriental Studies was an established academic discipline. However, while scholarly study expanded, so did racist attitudes and popular stereotypes of "inscrutable" and "wily" orientals. Often scholarly ideas were intertwined with such prejudicial racial or religious assumptions.[2] Eastern art and literature were still seen as "exotic" and as inferior to classical Graeco-Roman ideals. Their political and economic systems were generally thought to be feudal "oriental despotisms" and their alleged cultural inertia was considered to be resistant to progress. Many critical theorists regard this form of Orientalism as part of a larger, ideological colonialism justified by the concept of the "white man's burden." The colonial project, then, is not imagined as a process of domination for political and economic gain; it is figured as a selfless endeavor carried out to rescue the Orientals from their own backwardness and self-mismanagement.

Orientalism and the arts Imitations of Oriental styles Orientalism has also come to mean the use or reference of typical eastern motifs and styles in art, architecture, and design. Early use of motifs lifted from the Indian subcontinent have sometimes been called "Hindoo style," one of the earliest examples being the faade of Guildhall, London (17881789). The style gained momentum in the west with the publication of the various views of India by William Hodges and William Daniell and Thomas Daniell from about 1795. One of the finest examples of "Hindoo" architecture is Sezincote House (c. 1805) in Gloucestershire. Other notable buildings using the Hindoo style of Orientalism are Casa Loma in Toronto, Sanssouci in Potsdam, and Wilhelma in Stuttgart. Chinoiserie is the catch-all term for decorations involving Chinese themes in Western Europe, beginning in the late seventeenth century and peaking in waves, especially Rococo Chinoiserie, ca 17401770. From theRenaissance to the eighteenth century Western designers attempted to imitate the technical sophistication of Chinese ceramics with only partial success. Early hints of Chinoiserie appear, in the seventeenth century, in the nations with active East India companies such as England, Denmark, Holland, and France. Tin-glazed pottery made at Delft and other Dutch towns adopted genuine blue-and-white Ming decoration from the early seventeenth century, and early ceramic wares at Meissen and other centers of true porcelain imitated Chinese shapes for dishes, vases, and teawares. After 1860, Japonaiserie, sparked by the arrival of Japanese woodblock prints, became an important influence in the western arts in particular on many modern French artists such as Claude Monet. The paintings of James McNeil Whistler and his "Peacock Room" are some of the finest works of the genre; other examples include the Gamble House and other buildings by California architects Greene and Greene. Depictions of the Orient in art and literature Depictions of Islamic "Moors" and "Turks" (imprecisely named Muslim groups of North Africa and West Asia) can be found in Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque art. But it was not until the nineteenth century that "Orientalism" in the arts became an

established theme. In these works the myth of the Orient as exotic and decadently corrupt is most fully articulated. Such works typically concentrated on Near-Eastern Islamic cultures. Artists such as Eugene Delacroix and Jean-Lon Grme painted many depictions of Islamic culture, often including lounging odalisques, and stressing lassitude and visual spectacle. When Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, director of the French Acadmie de peinture, painted a highly colored vision of a Turkish bath, he made his eroticized Orient publicly acceptable by his diffuse generalizing of the female forms, who might all have been of the same model. Sensual depictions of the erotic Orient were acceptable; a Western scene dressed similarly would not be. This orientalizing imagery persisted in art into the early twentieth century, as evidenced in Matisse's orientalist nudes. In these works the "Orient" often functions as a mirror to Western culture itself, or as a way of expressing its hidden or illicit aspects. In Gustave Flaubert's novel Salammb ancient Carthage in North Africa is used as a foil to ancient Rome. Its culture is portrayed as morally corrupting and suffused with dangerously alluring eroticism. This novel proved hugely influential on later portrayals of ancient Semitic cultures. The use of the orient as an exotic backdrop continued in the movies (including many of those starring Rudolph Valentino). Later the caricature of the wealthy Arab in robes became a more popular theme, especially during the oil crisis of the 1970s. In the 1990s the Arab terrorist became a common villain figure in Western movies. Edward Said and "Orientalism" Edward Said, American Palestinian scholar, is best known for describing and critiquing "Orientalism," which he perceived as a constellation of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward the East. In Orientalism (1978), Said described the "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture."[3] He argued that a long tradition of false and romanticized images of Asia and the Middle East in Western culture had served as an implicit justification for Europe's and America's colonial and imperial ambitions. Just as fiercely, he denounced the practice of Arab elites who internalized the American and British orientalists' ideas of Arabic culture. Both supporters of Edward Said and his critics acknowledge the profound, transformative influence that his book Orientalism has had across the spectrum of the

humanities; but whereas his critics regard his influence as limiting, his supporters praise his influence as liberating. Criticisms of Said Critics of Said's theory, such as the historian Bernard Lewis, argue that Said's account contains many factual, methodological, and conceptual errors. They claim that Said ignores many genuine contributions to the study of Eastern cultures made by Westerners during the Enlightenment and Victorian eras. Said's theory does not explain why the French and English pursued the study of Islam in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, long before they had any control or hope of control in the Middle East. He has been criticized for ignoring the contributions of the Italians and the Dutch, and also of the massive contribution of German scholars. Lewis claims that the scholarship of these nations was more important to European Orientalism than the French or British, but the countries in question either had no colonial projects in the Mid-East (Dutch and Germans), or no connection between their Orientalist research and their colonialism (Italians). Said's theory also does not explain why much of Orientalist study did nothing to advance the cause of imperialism. Supporters of Said and his influence Saids supporters argue that such criticisms, even if correct, do not invalidate his basic thesis, which they say still holds true for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and in particular for general representations of the Orient in Western media, literature, and film.[4] His supporters point out that Said himself acknowledges limitations of his studies in that they fail to address German scholarship (Orientalism 1819) and that, in the "Afterword" to the 1995 edition of Orientalism, he, in their view, convincingly refutes his critics (32954). New World Encyclopedia: http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Orientalism

Orientalism-Islam and Romantic Orientalism: Literary Encounters with the Orient By Massad, Joseph Academic journal article from The Middle East Journal, Vol. 51, No. 4 Article details Islam and Romantic Orientalism: Literary Encounters with the Orient, by Mohammed Sharafuddin. London: I.B. Tauris, 1996. xxxv + 274 pages. Notes to p. 282. Bibl. to p. 288. Index to p. 296. $19.95 paper. Mohammed Sharafuddin's Islam and Romantic Orientalism, first published in 1994, sets out to "demonstrate the implications of .realistic orientalism...an oxymoron...that links together . . .the idea of imaginative escape and libidinous investment contained in the notion of orientalism, and the idea of a body of knowledge outside the self and independent of the subjective desire contained in the notion of realism" (p. vii). Unlike modern critics who, according to the author, represent "society as a closed system of interrelated values," Sharafuddin seeks to show how "a society...renews itself, not in how it remains static and enslaved by its perceptions and dogmatic conventions" (p. viii). As a point of departure, Sharafuddin takes on Edward Sa`id's work on Orientalism, the arguments of which he seeks to challenge. Said is depicted as having "a limited view of literature as a creative progress towards the discovery of truth and not merely a reflection of the age's social and political tendencies" (p. ix). Sharafuddin attributes to Sa`id the position that "the thought of all Western writers was wholly conditioned by an all-enveloping cultural grid" (p. xvii). Sa`id, however, never made such claims. In Orientalism, Sa`id was clear that Western "scholars and critics who are trained in the traditional Orientalist disciplines are perfectly capable of freeing themselves from the old straitjacket."' He cites Jacques Berque and Maxime Rodinson as examples. Also, Sa`id did not study Orientalism as a static system of ideas, rather as "a dynamic exchange between individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the three great empires-British, French, American-in whose intellectual and imaginative territory the writing was produced."2 For Sa`id, Orientalism was always transforming. His task was to identify "changes, modulations, refinements, even revolutions [that] take place within Orientalism."3

While modern critics, Sa`id included, are accused of emphasizing the cultural and social milieux of authors at the expense of their "personal side," Sharafuddin emphasizes their "individual singularity and particular personality that was the prime instigator of their interest in other cultures" (p. x). But Sa`id did not ignore the personal biographies of Orientalists-be they Christian missionaries, colonial military officers, colonial politicians, travelers, academicians, politicians, colonial-settlers, etc.-rather, such biographies were always important in explaining an Orientalist's representation of the Orient. Sa`id is also faulted for his alleged reliance on Michel Foucault's episteme, which Sharafuddin erroneously identifies as an "ideology in a hard sense" (p. xvii). Actually, according to Foucault, episteme is not any kind of ideology, it is "the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems."4 But Sa`id sets himself apart from Foucault by stating-among his many critiques of the latter-his belief "in the determining imprint of individual writers upon the otherwise anonymous collective body of texts constituting a discursive formation like Orientalism."5 Sa`id did not seek to prove that Orientalists are against the Orient or that they do not tell the "truth" of the Orient; rather, he showed how "the Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West."6 When Sa`id is speaking about cultural discourse and exchange within a culture, he does not positivistically oppose truth to falsity, rather that "what is commonly circulated by it is not 'truth' but representations."' http://www.questia.com/library/journal/1P3-22654133/orientalism-islam-and-romanticorientalism-literary

Romantic Orientalism Ever since Byron returned from Ottoman Greece and Ali Pasha's Albania in 1811, British culture has sought to interpret the mysterious East in ways that were as complex as they were contradictory. Romantic orientalism emerged out of the effort to describe Arabic (and especially Islamic) culture in ways that reflected not only reality but also the biases of the Europeans who did the describing: religious, political, social, and aesthetic. Our course will begin with examples of Romantic Orientalism The History of Nourjahad , Vathek , and Byron's own The Giaour and will then read contemporary critiques of these works (Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Maria Edgeworth) as well as more recent critics: Felicity Nussbaum, Adam Potkay, and Marilyn Butler. We will then read Eastern works that have had a more direct influence on our own times: The Arabian Nights , the poems of Rumi, and works of contemporary fiction and poetry by Elias Khoury, Naguib Mahfouz, Adonis, and others. Finally, we will consider film and media images of the Arab and Islamic world that have contributed to a more contemporary American version of orientalism, and we will examine the Arab world's view of these same images and stereotypes: evil sultans, alluring harems, violent terrorists. We will also consider the possibility of an occidentalism that parallels the excesses and confusions of orientalism. Our goal in all of our work will be to see the world once called The Orient reflected, refracted, and reimagined by Western and Eastern viewers. Along the way we will seek to understand how literary texts can help us to understand the complexities of different cultures. The course will also focus attention on critical approaches and literary methods and will help students to develop more sophisticated research skills as they move toward the senior seminar year. http://users.dickinson.edu/~nicholsa/379f01.html

Orientalism: The Romantics' Added Dimension; or, Edward Said Refuted Naji B. Oueijan (Notre Dame University, Zouk Mikayel, Lebanon) There is no more doubt that Western scholarly works in almost all fields of study betray a significant debt to the Eastern culture - Homer's Iliad (c.700 B.C.), considered by many to be the corner-stone of Western literary tradition, is an Oriental work, as Wallace Gray has proven.(1) And historians no more doubt the impact of this culture on the Anglo-Saxons: "The Celtic race, its tribal organizations, its tales and traditions all embody Oriental ideas brought by Irish travelers from the most distant East."(2) In early times and later, the East had a lot to offer to the West - perhaps the greatest gift of all was Christianity, which pulled England and the whole West from ages of darkness - and Oriental scholarship played a significant role to promoting this cross-cultural transmission. However, any serious academic attempt to discuss "Orientalism" in English literature is bound to start with a confutation of the definition made popular by Edward Said in his book, Orientalism (1977). My starting point is Said's ending point that we as scholars cannot be indifferent to what we do "if we remember that the study of human experience usually has an ethical, to say nothing of a political, consequence in either the best or worst sense [...]" and that we "should remember that the study of man in society is based on concrete human history and experience, not on donnish abstractions, or on obscure laws or arbitrary systems."(3) To say nothing of its ethical and political consequence, Said's discussion of Orientalism, comprehensive and enticing, seems highly polemical in nature. Said labels Orientalism as an academic field which serves in a number of academic institutions: "anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient - and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orientalism." Said believes that since the late eighteenth century the academic and imaginative meanings of Orientalism have been quite "disciplined" perhaps even regulated "traffic between the two." But unfortunately, from then onwards he does not base his work on these definitions; rather he bases it on his third definition (labeled as historical) in which he states that Western Orientalism dealt with the Orient "by making

statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient."(4) Said goes on to assert that the hostile political relationship between the East and the West was from its earliest beginning a hostile relationship between Islam and Christianity. He affirms that Orientalism, which always presented Christendom as superior and as a representation of European domination of the Orient, served to enhance hostility between the two religions, and so between the two "unequal halves" of the world. Said relates this Western attitude to the spread of Islam over a large part of the Western world at the beginning of the fourteenth century, a threat which represented a "lasting trauma" to the Europeans.(5) This rather provoking view of Said seems somewhat doubtful if one makes an objective investigation of the East-West relationship. The "lasting trauma" which Said talks about was caused by the direct clashes between the Eastern Islamic and Western Christian powers and not between Islam and Christianity. In his authoritative work, The Arabs and Mediaeval Europe, Norman Daniel, a scholar whom Said quotes in his work, points out that in those times the dominant belief of both Moslems and Christians was that resemblance rather than difference "dominated the dogmatic, liturgical and moral bases of the tworeligions,"(6) and that it was not abnormal for a Christian ruler to make Moslem allies, or for a Moslem to turn to a European ruler for help, being quite indifferent about culture and religion.(7) Daniel's discussion, geared to prove the above points, presents endless examples of such cooperation between Western Christians and Eastern Moslems and of the compatibility of both religions. The real threat came from the Seljuk, the Mongol, and the Ottoman powers. And the real conflict was not between two religions, as the Crusade (a pilgrimage in arms) tried to popularize, but between world-powers. One must not forget that similar "traumas" were caused earlier by the Greek, Roman, Byzantine and, more recently, the German powers. Said also insists on limiting Orientalism to the prejudiced Western or Christian study of Islam and the East. He also believes that Western Orientalism has never been a genuine and scholarly study of the East for its own sake and for its cultural richness: "Yet never has there been such a thing as pure, or unconditional, Orient; similarly, never has there been a nonmaterial form of Orientalism, much less something so innocent as an 'idea' of the Orient."(8)

This view, however, cannot be accepted for three reasons:

First, it is wrong to assume that Oriental scholarship is limited to the study of Islam, when in fact Biblical scholarship is an integral and consequential part of Orientalism. Students of Christian theology (like Bede, and later Shelling, Hegel and several others) were certainly Oriental scholars because they were obliged to study the Biblical history of the East.

Second, there is no doubt that a recognizable part of Western works was motivated by religious and political propaganda and appeared throughout the ages with distorted images of Islam, the East and its cultures; however, this movement cannot be termed "Orientalism", rather it is "False Orientalism".(9)

Third, if one accepts durability as a standard of authenticity - Thomas Carlyle uses this standard to prove the authenticity of the Prophet Mohammed and Islam in his Heroes - and Hegel's view that whatever is true has the force to develop, Orientalism could not have lasted this long and developed had it been built only upon falsification and distortion.

Like other "-isms", Orientalism has been abused from the early ages and up till the present. However, concrete in itself and developing, Orientalism can better be seen as an organic movement whose durability is ample proof of its universal authenticity. "Orientalism" proper is a nexus of knowledge and a cornucopia of rich material produced by different kinds of researchers and scholars genuinely interested in one of the wealthiest cultures of the world, the Oriental culture. This genuine scholarly movement became a fully established Western field of study in the second half of the eighteenth century, but it was recognized as far back as the fifteenth century, when Western travelers to the Orient were pilgrims and scholars who sought the Holy Land or the wisdom of the East. "In the East they learned Syriac, Hebrew, and later on Arabic, and thus they prepared the way for the future Orientalism in Ireland," says M. Mansoor.(10) Oriental material appeared in the literary works of independent travelers and scholars who liberated themselves from the predominant political and religious prejudice against the East and who sought genuine understanding of the culture of that distant part of the world throughout the ages. The abundance of Oriental material reached a peak in the late eighteenth century. Said himself acknowledges this fact and gives a long list of

genuine Orientalists and discusses their authentic presentation of the Orient;(11) yet he finds that in such a relatively insulated and specialized tradition as Orientalism, "there is in each scholar some awareness, partly conscious and partly nonconscious, of national tradition, if not of national ideology."(12) Indeed, Said's definition and discussion of Orientalism imply his keen consciousness of his national ideology. Said could not deny, however, the great impact of Orientalism on Romanticism; he admits that the first was a powerful shaper of the second: "It is difficult nonetheless to separate such institutions of the Orient as Mozart's from the range of pre-Romantic and Romantic representations of the Orient as exotic locale. Popular Orientalism during the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth attained a vogue of considerable intensity." However, he doubts the interest of William Beckford, Lord Byron, Thomas Moore, and Goethe in Oriental matter for its own sake; he believes that it was more like an outlet to their concern in "Gothic tales, pseudomedieval idylls, visions of barbaric splendor and cruelty. [...] Sensuality, promise, terror, sublimity, idyllic pleasure, intense energy: the Orient as a figure in the pre-Romantic, pretechnical Orientalist imagination of the late-eighteenth-century Europe was really a chameleonlike quality called (adjectivally) 'Oriental'."(13) However, the Romantic interest in the Gothic has no direct relation to the Orient; it is directly related to a revival of interest in Medieval church architecture, which itself is indirectly related to Oriental architecture. In his The Genius of Christianity (1802), Chateaubriand makes it clear that the poets and novelists of the age had a natural return toward the manners of their ancestors when introducing "dungeons, spectres, castles, and Gothic churches, into their fiction, - so great is the charm of recollections associated with religion and the history of our country."(14) Said thus mixes the Romantic writers' tendency to medievalize with their earnest proclivity to Orientalize. In fact, the first quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed two significant strains of Orientalism in Romantic literature. The growing popularity of the Oriental tales, especially the Arabian Nights, stimulated a burst of Orientalism in prose-fiction. The natural proclivity of the Romantics for the exotic generated the second wave in the form of poetry. Just as the Romantic writers of prose-fiction were fascinated with the original structure of the Oriental tales, the poets of the period were deeply preoccupied with the remote and exotic in order to stir their imaginative powers and to suggest the added dimension they were seeking. To the Romantics, the East was a model world of

exoticism, and what helped popularize such an image of the East was a very old Western tradition which started way before politics and trade had forced the Orient on the attention of the Western peoples; it started with the Westerners amazement that the East, and not the West, should have been the birthplace of almost all ancient civilizations and of heavenly religions, particularly Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. One can easily imagine how peoples emerging from ages of barbaric superstition, their spirits haunted by myths of heroes battling against forces of Nordic night, could be seized with wonder at Bible stories of the supernatural powers of Christ. Samuel Chew comments that these stories, together with the influx of supposed relics brought from the Holy Land during the Crusades, "had their part in filling the popular imagination with [positive] dreams and fantasies of the East."(15) These dreams and fantasies, besides the stories brought home by Western travelers (pilgrims and scholars) to the Orient, found their way into the minds of the Westerners; thus, their admiration of the East as the Sacred Land and as an exotic world of wonder and wisdom was deeply rooted in the Western mentality. Ever since this image of the East had invaded the popular notions of the Western publics, several British and Continental literary figures had sought to satisfy their publics by making allusions to the exotic East. Louis Wann notes that between 1558 and 1642 the major British playwrights produced no less than forty-seven plays dealing with Eastern material. "The production of oriental plays was not due to the fancy of any one author or group of authors," Wann says; it was due to the interest of the Elizabethan audience in Oriental matter. (16) It was public interest which stimulated writers to allude, authentically or sometimes otherwise, to the mysterious Orient. Some British and Continental literary figures sought to cash in on this popular craving, despite their own lack of personal or scholarly interest, much like modern advertisers trying to sell their wares. Such writers cannot and should not be categorized as "Orientalists." But the writers who were stimulated by personal interest to investigate and study the East, and those who resided there for first hand observation and education were genuine Oriental scholars. Besides, with the tide of Romanticism at the turn of the nineteenth century, several literary writers went ahead of their public expectations by fully integrating Eastern material into their works, firing the imagination with its exoticism, instead of merely using it as decoration. Further, it is my firm conviction that this shift stimulated even

more than ever before a truly scholarly attitude to the East devoid of the traditional Western conventions. William Jones, the leader of Eastern scholarship in the eighteenth century, had already predicted this change when he declared in the second half of the century: "If the languages of the Eastern nations were studied in our great seminaries of learning, where every other branch of useful knowledge is taught to perfection, a new and ample field would be opened for speculation; we should have a more extensive insight into the history of the human mind, we should be furnished with a new set of images and similitudes; and a number of excellent compositions would be brought to light, which future scholars might explain, and future poets might imitate."(17) In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this interest developed with the several translations and subsequent publications of some of the most popular Oriental tales. Jean Antoine Galland, once the secretary of the French Embassy in Constantinople, translated the Arabian tales, Alf Laila wa Laila, into French. His Les Mille et une Nuits appeared in twelve small volumes between 1704 and 1717; these volumes were immediately translated into English as the Arabian Nights, which ran through at least thirty editions in English and French during the eighteenth century alone. Their instant popularity encouraged Petits de la Croix to publish the Turkish Tales in 1707 and the Persian Tales, or a Thousand and One Days from 1710 to 1712. Both editions were quickly rendered into English. These and other translated OrientalTales(18) stirred the imagination of Western writers and their public with the glamour of the East. Above all, their structure, the frame-tale including many stories within a tale, attracted the attention of the writers; it allowed them to add color and variety to their works, and it laid the bases of a new literary genre in the West, the novel. Martha Pike Conant asserts that the "Arabian Tales was the fairy godmother of English novel."(19) The immediate influence of these stories on the eighteenth century may be seen in the structural arrangement of Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), Addison's The Papers of Sir Roger de Coverley (1711-1712), Goldsmith's Citizen of the World (1760), Johnson's Rasselas (1759), and most particularly Beckford's Vathek (1786), which deserves particular attention as it was the first Romantic work of prose-fiction promoting Orientalism. The world of the Arabian Nights, both visionary and concrete, imaginary and realistic, supernatural and natural, enabled William Beckford to escape the onerous demands of his distinguished and wealthy family. Lewis Melville asserts that the Arabian

Nights "had fired his youthful mind and held his imagination captive; their influence over him never waned all the days of his life."(20) Aged seventeen, he went on a tour to Switzerland (1777) and Venice (1780), after which his "knowledge of the East began to show signs of becoming encyclopedic."(21) Four years later, as one of the people best informed about the East then in England, Beckford was ready to start on his one and only masterpiece. The originality of Vathek lies in its revealing two distinct worlds, the visionary world of man's soul and the concrete exterior world known through his senses. Both are fused into an exotic whole which powerfully stirs the writer's imaginative faculties into deeper dimensions of the soul and its mysteries, perhaps most strikingly in the tale of the Hall of Eblis. Such a visionary world is an outcome of the concrete, exotic East which is not only avowedly Oriental but palpably authentic as well. One may admit with Conant that Vathek "gives an impression of an extraordinary dream."(22) But unlike other dreams it advances man's quest beyond the normal dimensions of his intellect and imagination to find his true identity. In this sense, Orientalism in Vathek is an integral part of the work, expressing Beckford's views of himself and the world. Beckford's extensive use of Eastern material rendered Vathek a major source for Oriental matters; yet, it was, as Conant testifies, to remain "a sporadic and isolated phenomenon in eighteenth-century fiction."(23) And until Lord Byron gave it great publicity in the notes to his own Oriental tales, Vathek was ahead of its time for it addressed the needs not of its own age but rather of the following one. During the early nineteenth century, travel to the Levant became increasingly popular, and travel accounts were recognized as a distinct type of literature. Investigating the great influence of this travel movement on the social and literary activities of the time, Wallace Cable Brown explains: "The great vogue for writing and reading of Near East travel books between 1775 and 1825 naturally had a marked influence on contemporary thought and activity"; he emphasizes the strong influence of such books on the literature of the period, because "these travel books helped to create at home a large body of poetry and prose of which this region is the theme or background."(24) Brown's note is significant as implying that the Romantics were interested in Eastern matter for personal literary reasons and not for religious and/or political propaganda. In fact, the Romantic tendency to secularize traditional theological concepts pushed religious issues to the background. Besides, on a more scholarly level, the translation of Eastern religious and

literary works into English by such scholars as James Atkinson, Edward William Lane, W. Gibb, Richard Burton, and Godferey Higgins prompted a deeper understanding of Eastern civilization. In literature, Romantic writers of prose-fiction followed the tradition of Beckford, but none surpassed him, as most of them were particularly interested in the original structure of the Oriental tale. Isaac Disraeli in his Mejnoun and Leila, the Arabian Petrarch and Laura (1797), Maria Edgeworth, in her "Murad the Unlucky"(1802), Mary Lamb in her, "The Young Mahometan" (1809), and Julia Pardoe in her The Romance of the Harem (1839), made excellent imitations of the Eastern tales. All of these works were surpassed by two popular novels: James Morier's Hajji Baba of Isphahan (1824), and Thomas Hope'sAnastasius; or, Memoirs of a Greek (1819). With its elaborate and concrete references to Oriental matter, Anastasius was the first picturesque Oriental novel in England; its immediate popularity drove the English reading public to attribute the work to Lord Byron, who told his publisher, John Murray, "I thought Anastasius excellent - did I not say so?"(25) Orientalism in Romantic poetry, however, had a more significant function: it became an essential poetic feature. For the Romantic poets the East with its topography and peoples was an existing exotic mystery by itself, liberating them from the chains of classical traditions. On this same issue Maryanne Stevens comments: "One of the preoccupations which profoundly affected the Western understanding of the Near East was the belief that this region could satisfy the West's urge for exotic experience. Exoticism meant the artistic exploration of territories and ages in which the free flights of the imagination were possible because they lay outside the restrictive operation of classical rules."(26) In Book V of The Prelude, the Orient inspires William Wordsworth with a sense of wonder and strangeness, when by the seashore reading a book, he passes into a dream, in which he finds himself in a waterless sea, a desert, and beholds an Arab Bedouin who bears a stone and a shell in his hands. The stone is "Euclid's Element," and the poet perceives it to be a book of "geometric truth"; the shell is a book of poetry which prophesies the destruction of the world by a deluge. This vision "reaches the very 'ne plus ultra' of sublimity," says DeQuincey.(27) In Samuel Taylor Coleridges Eastern visionary poem, "Kubla Khan" (1797), actual Eastern places and events are utilized to create an exotic and supernatural world which embodies the poet's most sublime

thoughts about the power and function of man's imagination. Historic Eastern matter, evoking the excitement of the remote and exotic and creating a sense of "strangeness in beauty", flashes back and forth in a work bearing the core of Coleridges vision, which transcends the consciousness of the poet. In "Ozymandias" (1817-1818) Shelley asserts an "antique land" in order to reveal the emptiness of pomp and power. In this sonnet Shelley creates a sense of remoteness, antiquity, and wonder by utilizing Eastern images borrowed from a historic figure and an actual setting in order to reach a high level of awareness. John Keats presents his conception of art in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (1819). From a variety of authentic sources, Keats contemplates a Grecian urn with two scenes: the first showing an ancient Greek wedding rite; and the second exhibiting an ancient religious ritual, a sacrifice at an altar. These scenes epitomize the Romantic search for an ultimate Truth as the first picture implies the infinite superiority of art over death, and the second affirms that art creates eternal realities. No one, however, made a better contribution to the promotion of Orientalism for its own sake and as a distinctive Romantic feature than Lord Byron. He turned to the East because it was powerful, wise, and sensuous, yet lively, beautiful and primitive - a beckoning world of allure and strong passion. For Byron, as was the case with all Romantic poets, strong passion was the essence and poetry of life; in the East he could live his immediate state of existence in a world far away from the restricted and formal life of England. His travels in the East were to leave their lasting stamp on his personal life and poetic career. "Like the later French romantic writers Chateaubriand and Lamartine, Flaubert and de Nerval, Byron's journey to the East was partly a private pilgrimage into the exotic recesses of his own mind" to discover the mysteries of his immediate state of being.(28) They stimulated Byron to write four Oriental verse tales: The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, and The Siege of Corinth, which had their main source in the exotic Orient. In his tales Byron created Eastern characters dwelling in genuine Oriental settings and alluded to real Eastern customs and costumes; he also employed Eastern images and phraseology. But more than anything else, he contemplated themes revealing his most passionate and intense Romantic views: mans search for his true identity in a world of mysterious conflicts and opposites. To Byron Time, which preoccupied the Romantics with its mystery and immense temporal experience, seemed to start and stop in the world of Hassan and Leila, or Giaffir, Selim and Zuleika, or Conrad, Medora and Gulnare, or Alp

and Francesca, who in the search for their positions in their world, live the most elementary, unsophisticated yet immensely passionate moments. Anything and everything is possible in a world, where every moment brings an original experience, and every new experience draws man closer to his true identity. In this sense, Orientalism pulled Byron towards the realms of higher states of awareness and stimulated his poetic genius to bring about that added dimension he eagerly sought in his personal life as well as in his works. Indeed it is difficult to read extensively in the works of the Romantics without coming away with the feeling that there emanates from their writings a sense of determination to explore the mysteries of existing yet obscure realities. Their insistance on a voyage or a pilgrimage away from conventional civilization manifested itself in two forms: a physical (Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage) and/or a mental (Coleridge'sThe Ancient Mariner) quest toward the exotic and mysterious. George Poulet introduces his article, "Timelessness and Romanticism," by saying: "Romanticism is first of all a rediscovery of the mysteries of the world, a more vivid sentiment of the wonders of nature, a more acute consciousness of the enigmas of the self."(29) It is a rediscovery of oneself and the world, a resurgence of wonder and freedom, and an attempt to break the confines and limitations of the traditional, to go beyond it, and to break the confines of time and space, the present time and space, of the traditional religious and political life. Consequently, the Romanticist sought new and old dimensions - not imaginary by themselves as much as stimulating and firing his imagination; the old dimension, he found in a medievalizing tendency; and the new dimension, in an Orientalizing urge. To the Romantic writer the tendency to reconcile and unify the inner elements of the psyche was reflected in an outer drive to unite all aspects of nature. Both Hegel and Schopenhauer advance the view that separateness in the world is an illusion. Thus Romanticism does not separate the world into an Occident and an Orient. When Lord Byron swam across the Hellespont, Wordsworth dreamt of the desert and the Arab Bedouin, and Coleridge had his dream of Xanadu, they were celebrating the unification of both worlds, the first in actual reality, the other two in their imagination. Besides, the idea that the Orient represented emotion and freedom, primitive yet passionate and powerful, attracted the Romanticists. And the tendency to naturalize and idealize was exotic by itself. The Orient gave the Romantic writer the chance to break the current classical forms which limited his imagination; it set his wild inner sense of the present

free. If Romantic literature, as Bernard Blackstone believes, is a literature of movement, of pilgrimage and quest, then the Orient made it possible for the Romantic writer to move freely either in actual reality or on the wings of imagination. When Alfred de Musset made his metaphoric definition of Romanticism, he had the Orient in the back of his mind: "Romanticism is the star that weeps, the wind that wails, the night that shivers, the flower that flies, and the bird that exudes perfume. Romanticism is the unhoped-for ray of light, the languorous rapture, the oasis beneath the palm-tree, ruby hope with its thousand loves, the angel and the pearl, the willow in its white garb. Oh, sir, what a beautiful thing! It is the infinite and the star, heat, fragmentary, the sober (yet at the same time complete and full); the diametrical, the pyramidal, the Oriental, the living nude, the embraceable, the kissable, the whirlwind."(30) The Romantic star, wind, night, flower, and bird seem to have found their true infinite dimensions in the East, which was devoid of classical rules and traditions and fertile in primitive passions and desires. The Romantics interest in originality and in rendering the familiar unfamiliar and vice versa, their venturing on the wings of their imaginative powers to the depth of their souls to discover their true identities, their basic preoccupation with creating new realistic and imaginative exotic worlds, and their excitement at eliminating the apparent contradictions and fusing the opposites in a unified entity rendered Orientalism, "the oasis beneath the palm-tree, [...] the Oriental," a major Romantic feature sought by the writers of the period to suggest their added dimension. This authentic temperament toward the Orient motivated Western scholars to further their study of a culture which still has much to offer. Notes (1) See Wallace Gray, Homer to Joyce (London, 1985). (2) M. Mansoor, The Story of Irish Orientalism (London: Longman, Green and Co., Ltd., 1944), p. 15. (3) Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, 1995), pp. 327-28. (4) Said, p. 2-3. (5) Said, p. 59.

(6) Norman Daniel, The Arabs and Mediaeval Europe (London: Longman, 1975, rpt. 1986), p.13. (7) Daniel, pp. 51 and 62. (8) Said, p. 23. (9) The topic is fully discussed in Naji B. Oueijan, The Progress of an Image: The East in English Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 1996). (10) Mansoor, p. 16. (11) See Said, pp. 6, 8, 18, 22, 24, 51-52, 78, 99 (includes a long list), 177, 124, 158 166, 168, and 177. (12) Said, p. 263. (13) Said, pp. 118-19. (14) See The Portable Romantic Reader, ed. Howard E. Hugo (New York: The Viking Press, 1975), p. 340. (15) Samuel C. Chew, The Crescent and The Rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance (1965; rpt. New York: Octagon Books, 1974), pp. 6-7. (16) Louis Wann, "The Oriental in Elizabethan Drama," Modern Philology 12 (1915), 423-47, 427. (17) See William Jones, Works, vol. IV (London, 1799), p. 547. (18) Other Oriental tales were published by Orientalists such as Rev. James Ridley, Tales of the Genii (1764); Alexander Dow, Tales of Inatulla (1768); both scholars were servants of the East India Company; Robert Bage, The Fair Syrian (1787); and a translation from French, The Beautiful Turk (1720). (19) Martha Pike Conant, The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908), p. 243. (20) Lewis Melville, Life and Letters of William Beckford of Fonthill (London: Heinemann, 1910), pp. 20-21. (21) Robert J. Gemmett, "Introduction," to Vathek by William Beckford: The English Translation by Samuel Henley (1786), and the French editions of Lausanne and Paris, facsim. Robert J. Gemmett (New York: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1972), p. Vii.

(22) Conant, p. 66. (23) Conant, p. 69. (24) Wallace Cable Brown, "The Popularity of English Travel Books about the Near East, 1775-1825," Philological Quarterly 15 (1936), 79-80. (25) Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. by Leslie A. Marchand, vol. VII (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 182. (26) Maryanne Stevens, "Western Art and its Encounter with the Islamic World, 17981914," in: The Orientalists. Delacroix to Matisse: The Allure of North Africa and the Near East, ed. Maryanne Stevens (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1984), p. 17. (27) Quoted by Ernest DeSelincourt in his edition of William Wordsworth's The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet's Mind (London: Oxford University Press, 1926) [1850 version of the poem], p. 526. (28) Stephen Coote, Byron: The Making of a Myth (London: The Bodley Head, 1988), p. 43. (29) George Poulet, "Timelessness and Romanticism," Prism[s]: Essays in Romanticism 2 (1994), 25. (30) See The Portable Romantic Reader, p. 73. Acknowledgement Permission to publish this article was graciously granted by the publishers of Romanticism in its Modern Aspects: Review of National Literatures and World Report. General Editor Anne Paolucci, ed. Virgil Nemoianu. Wilmington: Council on National Literatures, 1998: 37-50. http://webdoc.gwdg.de/edoc/ia/eese/artic20/naji/3_2000.html#fu30