Late Victorian Orientalism: Representations of the East in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Art and Culture from the Pre-Raphaelites to John La Farge

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jun 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785273292

Book preview

Late Victorian Orientalism

Late Victorian Orientalism

Representations of the East in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Art and Culture from the Pre-Raphaelites to John La Farge

Eleonora Sasso

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

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© 2020 Eleonora Sasso editorial matter and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-327-8 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-327-2 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

Eleonora Sasso

Chapter 1. FitzGerald’s timelines

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

Chapter 2. Empires and scapegoats: The Pre-Raphaelites in the Near East

Florence S. Boos

Chapter 3. Aja’ib , mutalibun and hur al-ayn : Rossetti, Morris, Swinburne and the Arabian Nights

Eleonora Sasso

Chapter 4. The use of contradictions in John La Farge’s prismatic syncretism

Andrea Mariani

Chapter 5. ‘Strange webs with Eastern merchants’: The Orient of aesthetic poetry

Elisa Bizzotto

Chapter 6. Rudyard Kipling, The Mark of the Beast and the elusive monkey

Miriam Sette

Chapter 7. Borrowed verses: Code and representation within the first travelogue of the city of Hong Kong, 1841–42

Christopher Cowell

Chapter 8. Newby and Thesiger: Humour and lament in the Hindu Kush

Ben Cocking

Chapter 9. The exoticism of Téchiné’s Les Sœurs Brontë : The dream of an impossible elsewhere

Fabrizio Impellizzeri

Bibliography

Index

FIGURES

2.1 Map of the Troad

2.2 Lion Gate, Mycenae, c. 1300–1250 BCE

2.3 Holman Hunt, self-portrait, 1867

2.4 John Ballantyne, Portrait of Holman Hunt in His Studio, 1865

2.5 Holman Hunt, The Sphinx in the Vicinity of Gaza , 1854

2.6 Holman Hunt, The Mosque al Ahakra in Jerusalem During Ramadan , 1854–55

2.7 Holman Hunt, The Scapegoat, final version, 1854–55

2.8 Holman Hunt, The Shadow of Death, 1873

2.9 Holman Hunt, The Finding of the Savior in the Temple, 1860

2.10 Lowering the Great Winged Bull, 1849

2.11 Discovery of Gigantic Head, 1849

2.12 Winged Human-headed Lion, 1849

2.13 William Morris at Oxford, 1857

2.14 General Charles George Gordon

3.1 D.G. Rossetti, Golden Water , Princess Parisade, 1858. Fitzwilliam Museum

3.2 D.G. Rossetti, Helen of Troy , 1863. Kunsthalle Hamburg

3.3 Conceptual blending network for The Beloved, or The Bride

3.4 D.G. Rossetti, Astarte Syriaca , 1877. Manchester Art Gallery

3.5 Conceptual blending network for the protagonists of Morris’s Oriental narrative poems

7.1 Detail of the first known survey map of the early colony of Hong Kong: Pottinger’s Map (1842)

7.2 One of the matshed ‘barracks’ erected for the sepoys

7.3 William Alexander, ‘Method of Carrying Heavy Packages’ versus Lieutenant Thomas Bernard Collinson, Study of a 36-Man Bamboo Carrying Cradle in Hong Kong

7.4 Lieutenant Thomas Bernard Collinson, ‘The Interior of Letter G’

7.5 Colesworthy Grant, ‘a native’s bungalow’ adapted for ‘the European resident’

7.6 William Tayler, ‘The Young Civilian’s Toilet’ and ‘The Village Barber’

7.7 Lieutenant Colonel George Phillpotts, Phillpotts’ Survey, East Elevation of Johnston’s House

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Elisa Bizzotto is Associate Professor of English Literature at Iuav University, Venice. Her research interests lie mainly in Victorian, late-Victorian and pre-Modernist literature and culture. She has published books on the imaginary portrait genre (2001), articles in the Pre-Raphaelite magazine Germ (2012, co-authored) and on Walter Pater (2018) and edited or co-edited volumes on Walter Pater (1996), Vernon Lee (2006, 2014), Arthur Symons (2018) and Mario Praz (2019). Bizzotto is currently translating and editing two of Bernard Shaw’s plays into Italian and writing on the influence of Italian oral literature on Vernon Lee. She is a member of the Council of the Doctoral School in History of the Arts of Ca’ Foscari University and one of the founding members of the Italian Oscar Wilde Society. She is an Officer of the International Walter Pater Society and part of the editorial board of the journals English Literature, Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism and Volupté.

Florence S. Boos is a professor of English at the University of Iowa, United States. Her teaching and research interests include Pre-Raphaelite art and literature, working-class literature, the life and work of William Morris, poetry by women, and nineteenth-century social, political and intellectual history, as well as Marxist and feminist approaches to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. The general editor of the William Morris Archive, she has published critical works on the poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris, most recently History and Poetics in the Early Writings of William Morris, 1856–1870 (2015). Boos has also published annotated critical editions of Morris’s The Earthly Paradise, The Socialist Diary (2nd ed., 2018) and The Life and Death of Jason and is the editor of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to William Morris (2020). Her annotated anthology Working-Class Women Poets of Victorian Britain appeared in 2008 and The Memoirs of Victorian Working-Class Women: The Hard Way Up in 2017. A former president of the Midwest Victorian Studies Association and the William Morris Society in the United States, she also serves on the advisory boards of Victorian Poetry, Journal of William Morris Studies and Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies.

Ben Cocking is Director of Research in the Centre for Journalism at the University of Kent, United Kingdom. His research interests include travel journalism, travel writing and travel-related media; specifically, representations of the Middle East in news media, Arabist and British post-war travel writing and adventure travel. He has published articles in journals such as Journalism Studies, Journeys: International Journal of Travel Writing and Studies in Travel Writing. Cocking contributed a chapter on representations of Africa in British travel journalism to the edited collection Travel Journalism: Exploring Production, Impact and Culture and recently co-authored Assessing the Delivery of BBC Radio 5 Live’s Public Service Commitments (2019). He is the author of Travel Journalism and Travel Media: Identities, Places and Imaginings (2020).

Christopher Cowell is a trained architect and historian at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), Columbia University, United States. His work examines urban militarism, spatial security, hinterland ecologies and medical and racial theory as a means of questioning the material processes and ideology behind colonialism across northern India in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has also written on colonial architecture, malaria and urbanism in Southern China, particularly Hong Kong. Cowell’s work has been published in Modern Asian Studies (2013) and Architecture beyond Europe (2016), among others. He currently lectures at GSAPP, teaching the core survey in architectural history and theory of the (global) nineteenth century.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow and Tutor at Magdalen College, United Kingdom. He is the author of Victorian Afterlives (2002), Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist (2011), which was awarded the 2011 Duff Cooper Prize, and The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland, which was shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Prize. He has also produced editions of Dickens’s Christmas Stories and Great Expectations, Kingsley’s The Water-Babies and Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, all for Oxford World’s Classics, and is currently completing editions of The Collected Peter Pan for Oxford University Press and A Tale of Two Cities for Norton. Douglas-Fairhurst writes regularly for publications such as the Guardian, TLS, Times, Spectator, Literary Review and New Statesman. Radio and television appearances include Start the Week, BBC Breakfast and The Culture Show, and he has also acted as the historical consultant on BBC productions of Jane Eyre, Emma, Great Expectations and Dickensian. In 2013 he was a judge of the Man Booker Prize, and in 2015 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Fabrizio Impellizzeri is Associate Professor of French Literature at the School of Foreign Languages and Literatures of Ragusa at the University of Catania, Italy. He has published on erotic sublimation and the political role of language and writing in contemporary French literature. His research interests also deal with applied sociolinguistics and the study of linguistic variation in contemporary cinema, film self-adaptation, myth rewriting and biographical fiction. Impellizzeri’s monographs include: L’écriture fantasmatique (2007), De l’écriture tactile à l’image (2008) and Sémiotique de l’outrage (2010). He is co-editor of the book series ‘Mercures – Studi Mediterranei di Francesistica’. He is also a member of the scientific committee of the journal Illuminazioni and an editorial board member of Ticontre: Teoria Testo e Traduzione and Quêtes littéraires.

Andrea Mariani taught Anglo-American Literature at the University of Rome I ‘La Sapienza’ (1974–88) and the ‘Gabriele d’Annunzio’ University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy (1988–2015), where he was Chairman of the Department of Linguistics and Literary Sciences (2000–2006). He was Vice-Rector, in charge of International Relationships (2006–10), President of the Italian Association for North-American Studies (2010–13) and Italian representative on the Board of the European Association for American Studies (2013–16). He is the author of four books: Scrittura e Figurazione nell’Ottocento americano da Horatio Greenough a Elihu Vedder (1984), Il sorriso del fauno (1992), L’arcobaleno infranto (1997) and Italian Music in Dakota (2017) and of various essays on the classics of the nineteenth century (Poe, Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, James). Mariani also published on several major poets of the twentieth century (Merwin, Merrill, Bishop, Plath, Wilbur) and edited eight volumes of the series Riscritture dell’Eden investigating the presence of the garden in literature, the arts and the history of taste (2003–15). He has just completed the first Italian edition and translation of Humphry Repton’s Observations on Landscape Gardening (forthcoming).

Eleonora Sasso is Associate Professor in English at the ‘Gabriele d’Annunzio’ University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy. Her major research fields include Victorian literature and culture, the Pre-Raphaelites, cognitive linguistics, intersemiotic and audiovisual translation, and Canadian studies. She has translated into Italian W. M. Rossetti’s Some Reminiscences and is author of four monographs, the most recent being The Pre-Raphaelites and Orientalism: Language and Cognition in Remediations of the East. Sasso is the co-editor of a book series entitled ‘Universale’ published by Biblion (advisory board members of language and translation include Carlo Bajetta, Susan Bassnett, Frederic Chaume Varela, Delia Carmela Chiaro, Jorge Díaz-Cintas, Tim Parks and Sherry Simon) and is an advisory board member of the scientific journals CounterText and English Studies at NBU.

Miriam Sette is Associate Professor of English Literature at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, ‘Gabriele d’Annunzio’ University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy. She has published several essays on Daniel Defoe, William Beckford, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, William Butler Yeats, H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe, Jean Rhys, Norman Douglas and Doris Lessing. She has translated and edited a collection of unpublished tales by various authors, from Horace Walpole to Mary Shelley, entitled Amori e rovine: Racconti gotici dei maestri del genere (2000). Sette is the author of four monographs on English writers of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Most recently she has edited, translated and introduced a collection of Kipling’s fantastical tales titled Il marchio della bestia e altri racconti del fantastic, with an afterword by Phillip Mallett (2018).

INTRODUCTION

Eleonora Sasso

‘Orientalism is after all a system for citing works and authors […] a marvellous instance of the interrelations between society, history, and textuality.’¹ In his influential work of intellectual history, Edward Said offers a system of representations for the cultural role played by the Orient in the West. Many European representations of the Arab-Islamic world are scrutinised for students of literature and criticism, contemporary students of the Orient and, last but not least, the general reader. The power of Said’s Orientalism (1978) lies in its ability to categorise and thereby give order to the multitude of Western conceptions and treatments of the East. By rendering the Orient knowledgeable in its multilayered forms, Said illuminated his readers on the richness of Orientalist discourse. Among producers of Orientalist discourse, he mentions impersonal writers offering a scientific observation of the East (aptly exemplified by Edward William Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians),² as well as semi-impersonal writers less willing to sacrifice their eccentricity (as in the case of Burton’s Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah)³ and personal Orientalist authors who experienced their metaphorical or real trips to the East as an epiphanic moment of growth (a paramount example is provided by Nerval’s Voyage en Orient).⁴

Despite the controversial reception of Orientalism, which was criticised partly for emphasising the irreconcilable division between East and West and partly for seeing the discipline as either a conscious body of knowledge (manifest Orientalism) or an unconscious body of knowledge (latent Oientalism), Said’s work deeply influenced Orientalist scholars from Sam Selvon to Salman Rushdie and Homi Bhabha and continues to spark debate even today. Even though Said’s discussion focused exclusively on European representations of the Middle East, his illuminating framework has been extended to a range of analyses of essentially very different aspects, or even geographical parts of the East. As attested to in a quite recent study by Mohamed Amine Brahimi and Clarisse Fordant entitled ‘The Controversial Receptions of Edward Said’ (2017),⁵ the most cited book by scholars from North America and Western Europe who investigated the relationship between history and literature is Orientalism. Brahimi and Fordant’s research demonstrates how authors and scholars deeply affected by Said’s work are not only related to teaching and research but are specialists of disciplines besides history, literature, political science, sociology and cultural studies. Such a variety of disciplines and authors dealing with Orientalism dates back to the nineteenth century when, according to Said, France and Britain were the dominant producers of Orientalist discourse.

Late Victorian Orientalism is a work of scholarly research pushing forward disciplines into new areas of enquiry. This collection of chapters tries to redefine the task of interpreting the East in the late nineteenth century taking as a starting point Said’s Orientalism in order to investigate the visual, fantasised and imperialist representations of the East, as well as the most exemplary translations of Oriental poems. The Victorians envisioned the East in many different modes or Orientalisms since, as Said suggested, ‘there were, perhaps, as many Orientalisms as Orientalists’.⁶ 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. Edward FitzGerald, William Bell Scott, the Brontë sisters, William Holman Hunt, D. G. Rossetti, William Morris, John La Farge, Algernon Swinburne, Walter Pater, the anonymous author of the Hongkong and the Hongkonians, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Rudyard Kipling, William Butler Yeats, Wilfred Thesiger and Eric Newby play such a prominent role in the Oriental debate. By offering an extended discussion of their Oriental writings, this book will appeal to and benefit a wider range of audiences.

During the nineteenth century the spread of an Oriental mania, affecting the Victorians’ conducts, gestures and behaviours which sometimes were irrational and absurd (Ford Madox Brown installed a Turkish bath at home, which he used on a daily basis; D. G. Rossetti kept a Japanese salamander among the animals and birds in the exotic menagerie at his house in Cheyne Walk; Sir Richard Burton used to wear a green Oriental turban to indicate his Arab connection), was almost unstoppable. There were more than 30 different English editions of Arabian Nights published between 1850 and 1890, and such Oriental luxuries as tea, opium, ceramics, chinoiserie, Indian silks and other goods entered Britain through imperial trade. Oriental paraphernalia were available from a new shop in Regent Street (Liberty’s East India House⁷ which opened in 1875), and Japanese and Chinese works of art could be obtained from dealers in New Oxford Street. Numerous were the exhibitions, museum displays and entertainment forms (such as pantomime, ballet and opera) representing the Middle East at a number of venues, including Drury Lane, Covent Garden, the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Crystal Palace and the British Museum. As Ziter suggests,

Nineteenth-century British theatre and entertainment […] reflected and helped constitute the modern British colonial imagery […] Throughout the nineteenth century, British audiences marvelled at depictions of desert storms and harem dances as well as Nile steamers and colonial armies at theatres, panoramas, and exhibition rooms […] the entertainment industry, as a primary site for the dissemination of visual information, was central in the creation of Europe’s image of the East.⁸

Thus, the Victorians were exposed to Orientalist forms of art imported from the Near East, the Middle East and the Far East during the imperial period. Deeply influenced by the nineteenth-century excavations at Nineveh and Troy, and in particular by the Assyrian Winged Bull that was transported to the British Museum in 1849, as well as by the obelisk known as ‘Cleopatra’s Needle’ that was erected on the Thames Embankment in 1879, late Victorian writers emphasise the universal values of Eastern civilisations, as exemplified in the paintings and poems of William Holman Hunt, D. G. Rossetti, William Morris, Algernon Swinburne and John La Farge. As Said explains, ‘Despite attempts to draw subtle distinctions between Orientalism as an innocent scholarly endeavor and Orientalism as an accomplice to empire, can never unilaterally be detached from the general imperial context that begins its modern global phase with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798.’⁹

Apart from dispersed articles in academic journals and occasional chapters focusing on the Victorians and Orientalism, no book-length study exists on such a topic as Late Victorian Orientalism. For example, in Orientalist Poetics (2002)¹⁰ Emily A. Haddad devotes attention to Romantic¹¹ and Victorian poets, including Shelley, Southey, Byron, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Arnold and Wilde, albeit overlooking the meaningful indebtedness of Edward FitzGerald, the Brontë sisters, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, John La Farge, Algernon Swinburne, Walter Pater, the anonymous author of the Hongkong and the Hongkonians, Arthur Symons, Rudyard Kipling, Wilfred Thesiger and Eric Newby to Oriental literature and culture. Haddad mainly investigates poetic representations of the East and imperialism without taking into considerations either visual, narrative and journalistic modes, or literary and cinematic adaptations.

Valerie Kennedy’s article on ‘Orientalism in the Victorian Era’¹² is a most valuable encyclopaedic compendium providing information about the Victorians’ obsession with the East, but it lacks the methodological approaches as well as the close textual and intertextual analyses which are necessary to deeply understand the Victorian multifaceted representations of the Orient. Only through new and original approaches to Victorian Orientalism, along with detailed textual, visual and journalistic analyses of Victorian works, is it possible to understand the extent to which the Oriental mania pervaded the minds of such eminent Victorians as Edward FitzGerald, William Bell Scott, the Brontë sisters, William Holman Hunt, D. G. Rossetti, William Morris, John La Farge, Algernon Swinburne, Walter Pater, the anonymous author of the Hongkong and the Hongkonians, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Rudyard Kipling, William Butler Yeats, Wilfred Thesiger and Eric Newby.

Throughout the nineteenth century the Orient was envisioned into three distinct units: Near East, Middle East and Far East. This interest in the Orient branched out geographically resulting in a demand for translations from a wider variety of languages. For example, Edward Lane’s translation from Arabic into English (18391–41) of the Arabian Nights, characterised by copious and informative notes, became extremely popular in England despite its omissions due to Victorian censorship and its many competitors (Andrew Lang’s retranslation of Galland, John Payne’s fuller version and Sir Richard Burton’s uncensored translation). As aptly summarised by Robert Irwin, ‘Lane designed his work for family reading. Therefore he expurgated or rewrote sections which he thought unsuitable for childish and virginal ears […] Not only did he prudishly censor his text, but in cases where he considered stories to be boring, repetitive or incomprehensible he omitted them too.’¹³

But apart from the translations and receptions of the Arabian Nights, to which Peter Caracciolo¹⁴ devoted an almost comprehensive edited collection of essays, another Oriental text such as the Rubáiyát – an anthology of sceptical and hedonistic poems by Omar Khayyám, a Persian poet, mathematician and astronomer – still deserves critical attention. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s engaging contribution on ‘FitzGerald’s timelines’ is an original rereading of FitzGerald’s translation of the Rubáiyát, strange and familiar lines obsessed with the notion of time passing in line with Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Gray’s Elegy and Tennyson’s In Memoriam. According to Douglas-Fairhurst’s thought-provoking analysis, the quatrain may be envisioned as an imaginative space in which different times collide and whose metre mimics the tread of time. Everything is time-oriented, and the quatrain’s pattern, style and punctuation may be metaphorically used to communicate the idea of time. As eloquently suggested by Douglas-Fairhurst, in the creative use of dashes, defined as little timelines, must be found the uniqueness of FitzGerald’s approach to poetry and translation always searching for some kind of order.

Florence Boos’s chapter entitled ‘Empires and scapegoats: The Pre-Raphaelites in the Near East’ is an important contribution to the field taking as its starting point Patrick Brantlinger’s comments on ‘post-colonial’ historiographies in order to investigate three British Pre-Raphaelite artists and their approaches to imperialism. Boos’s argument, which is powerfully and logically developed, focuses on William Holman Hunt’s attraction to Near Eastern cultural history, D. G. Rossetti’s imperial fascination with the remains of ancient Oriental cultures and William Morris’s political concern with the perils of wealth and domination corrupting the human mind. In this chapter, Boos interestingly explains how the Pre-Raphaelites were able to mediate between local perspectives and Oriental truths by offering what she calls ‘Archimedean standpoints’ from which to observe the complexity of Orientalism.

Eleonora Sasso’s contribution entitled ‘Aja’ib, mutalibun and hur al-ayn: Rossetti, Morris, Swinburne and the Arabian Nights’ applies Said’s categories of Orientalism to two Pre-Raphaelite artists and a Pre-Raphaelite follower by delineating three types of Orientalism: syncretic, ideological and sensual. If Rossetti appears to be a cultural mediator enlightened by the magic lamp of Orientalism experimenting with syncretic forms of Orientalism in his double works of art, then Morris, a sympathiser of the misery of people, the material life and the Arab townsfolk, is a producer of Marx’s ideological Orientalism.¹⁵ Like Nerval, Flaubert, Gautier, Baudelaire and Huysmans, Swinburne envisioned the East as a sexual dimension inhabited by such female figures as Cleopatra, Salome and Isis evoking the strong sensual, even pornographic, content of the Arabian Nights and thereby projecting in his poems what Said calls corporeal Orientalism.

Another noteworthy contribution to Orientalism and visual arts is Andrea Mariani’s chapter ‘The use of contradictions in John La Farge’s prismatic syncretism’ dealing with the nineteenth-century American artist John La Farge and Japonism/Orientalism as envisioned in his paintings, writings, illustrations, arts and crafts techniques and stained glass windows. All his experiments can be seen as syncretic works of art imbued with Oriental cultures and revealing his obsession with Hokusai and Confucius. By giving a new twist to La Farge’s visual art, Mariani is able to offer us a stimulating and dynamic vision of American Orientalism. The deep research, the original argument and the strong engagement with La Farge’s texts makes this contribution particularly appealing to Orientalist scholars of the Far East.

In many Victorian minds, the East represented a utopian dreamland of mysteries and sensuality, or in Nerval’s words ‘le pays des reves et de l’illusion’,¹⁶ which stimulated new aesthetic modalities as in the case of the Brontë sisters and fin-de-siècle authors. As Elisa Bizzotto aptly demonstrates in her chapter ‘Strange webs with Eastern merchants: The Orient of aesthetic poetry’, William Bell Scott, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons and William Butler Yeats experimented with new forms of Orientalism envisioning the ‘beautiful-as-strange’ and employing foreign-sounding vocabulary. As a paramount example of post-Romantic and pre-Aesthetic Orientalism, Bell Scott’s ‘Morning Sleep’ seems to represent alluring Eastern worlds and feminine sensuality anticipating not only Symons’s and Wilde’s Orientalist language but also Pater’s ideal of the aspiration of all arts to music.

A genuinely interesting contribution on the fantastic vision of the East is the one offered by Miriam Sette investigating Rudyard Kipling’s The Mark of the Beast (1890) from sociological and cultural perspectives (‘Rudyard Kipling, The Mark of the Beast and the elusive monkey’). By exposing the Anglo-Indian binary logic (Darwinism/demonism; humanity/bestiality; Imperial discourse/Maya discourse and so forth) as envisioned in Kipling’s fantastic-marvellous Oriental short story, Sette reaches a thought-provoking conclusion that is deeply rooted in the human subconscious. Behind such ‘melodramatic shapes’¹⁷ as the monkey, the wolf and the leper, there lie the anxieties and hesitations experienced by a person who, knowing only the laws of nature, confronts apparently supernatural creatures. It is this kind of elusiveness, as Sette calls it, characterising Kipling’s Anglo-Indian Orientalism which ravishes and still continues to haunt our minds.

From the end of the nineteenth century the Orient was a place of religious and non-religious pilgrimage, and every British pilgrim who visited any particular geographical Eastern area offered his/her own personal representation of the East in travel writings. Many travelogues on India,¹⁸ Egypt¹⁹ and Turkey²⁰ appeared throughout the Victorian period, but a few writers produced Orientalist travel texts on China and Persia. Christopher Cowell and Ben Cocking fill this critical gap investigating respectively a now lost early Victorian travelogue Hongkong and the Hongkonians (1841) and Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958). Cowell’s essay entitled ‘Borrowed verses: Code and representation within the first travelogue of the city of Hong Kong, 1841–42’ is an insightful and trenchant investigation of how the colony of Hong Kong was represented through cartography, building surveys, trade paintings, anthropological construction method studies and newspaper tirades. Interdisciplinarity characterises this chapter that bridges the work of the cultural historian with that of the literary commentator. As Cowell notes, Hong Kong was conceived as a lawless frontier space characterised by a political struggle for control. In such a blended space of languages and cultures new social entities and new terms were created.

In his engaging chapter (‘Newby and Thesiger: Humour and lament in the Hindu Kush’), Ben Cocking offers an intelligent discussion of both travel and postcolonial criticism. The symbolic encounter between Thesiger and Newby in the Hindu Kush (the great mountain system of central Asia), representing the Victorian tradition of travel writing and an emergent, parodial modern form, shows both a romanticisation of the past and a reaction to the loss of this past. The close reading and comparison of A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush and Among the Mountains (1998) offer examples of Orientalist forms of cultural representation as those found in travel writing of the previous century.

The volume concludes with a very original contribution on the Brontë sisters, Orientalism and film studies offering cinematic insights on a fairly unexplored topic. Almost all the available studies on the novels by the Brontë sisters²¹ focus on the issue of gender in relation with the Eastern models of masculinity and femininity. The filmic medium appears to be able to explore a form of exoticism emerging from the personal experiences of the Brontë siblings, makers of an imaginary Orient as highlighted by Fabrizio Impellizzeri’s contribution ‘The exoticism of Téchiné’s Les Sœurs Brontë: The dream of an impossible elsewhere’. As readers of the Arabian Nights, the Brontë sisters, who lived in isolation in the small village of Haworth surrounded by endless moors, fantasised about other exotic worlds. Impellizzeri interestingly and for the first time investigates from an Oriental perspective Les Sœurs Brontë (1979), a French drama film directed by André Téchiné whose remediation of fact and fiction sheds light on the imaginary Orientalism envisioned by the Brontë siblings. Les Sœurs Brontë, winner of the César Award for Best Film, aimed to project the Oriental metaphor of travelling without moving across exotic dimensions.

The subject range