VICTORIAN LITERARY ORIENTALISM BY SYED FAIZ ZAIDI [HARDCOVER]

Orientalism in the Victorian era has origins in three aspects of 18th-century European
and British culture: first, the fascination with The Arabian Nights (translated into French
by Antoine Galland in 1704), which was one of the first works to have purveyed to Western Europe the image of the Orient as a place of wonders, wealth, mystery, intrigue, romance, and danger; second, the Romantic visions of the Orient as represented in the
works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Gordon, Lord Byron, and
other Romantics as well as in Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh; and third, the domestication
of opium addiction in Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater.
Victorian Orientalism was all pervasive: it is prominent in fiction by William Thackeray,
the Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Conrad, and Rudyard Kipling,
but is also to be found in works by Benjamin Disraeli, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and
Robert Louis Stevenson, among others. In poetry Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat is a key
text, but many works by Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning also show the influence of
Orientalist tropes and ideas. In theater it is one of the constant strands of much popular
drama and other forms of popular entertainment like panoramas and pageants, while
travel writing from Charles Kingsley to Richard Burton, James Anthony Froude, and Mary Kingsley shows a wide variety of types of Orientalist figures and concepts, as do many
works of both popular and children’s literature. Underlying and uniting all these diverse
manifestations of Victorian Orientalism is the imperialist philosophy articulated by writers as different as Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx, supported by writings of anthropologists and race theorists such as James Cowles Pritchard and Robert
Knox.
Toward the end of the Victorian era, the image of the opium addict and the Chinese opium den in the East End of London or in the Orient itself becomes a prominent trope in fiction by Dickens, Wilde, and Kipling, and can be seen to lead to the proliferation of Oriental villains in popular fiction of the early 20th century by such writers as M. P. Shiel, Guy