Late Victorian Orientalism: Representations of the East in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Art and Culture from the Pre-Raphaelit

Description

Late Victorian Orientalism is a work of scholarly research pushing forward disciplines into new areas of enquiry. This collection of essays tries to redefine the task of interpreting the East in the nineteenth century taking as a starting point Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) in order to investigate the visual, fantasised, and imperialist representations of the East as well as the most exemplary translations of Oriental texts. The Victorians envisioned the East in many different modes or Orientalisms since as Said suggested '[t]here were, perhaps, as many Orientalisms as Orientalists'. By combining together Western and Oriental modes of art, this study is not only aimed at filling a gap in Victorian and Oriental studies but also at broadening the audiences it is intended for.

Eleonora Sasso is Associate Professor in English at the G. d'Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy. Her major research fields include Victorian literature and culture, the Pre-Raphaelites, cognitive linguistics, intersemiotic and audio-visual translation, and Canadian studies.

'This collection of thoughtful and original essays refi nes the way we think about Orientalism, demonstrating how late Victorian writers and artists virtually internalised the imperial project. In these essays, the political is the personal, the public is the private and aesthetic pleasure is not innocent.' -John M. Ganim, Distinguished Professor of English, University of California, Riverside, USA, and Author of Medievalism and Orientalism The nine essays collected in Late Victorian Orientalism: Representations of the East in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Art, and Culture from the Pre-Raphaelites to John La Farge offer several riches, especially those that truly fall into the category delineated by the collection's title. Several chapters focus fruitfully on material that all would agree falls under the subject of Victorian culture, if not exclusively its late period.- Barry Milligan, Victorian Studies, Volume 64, Number 2, Winter 2022, pp. 325-326