Radical Orientalism
Rights, Reform, and Romanticism

This book explores the relationship between ideas of the East and the struggle for democratic rights in the Romantic period.

Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud (Author)

9781107110328, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 30 July 2015

280 pages, 15 b/w illus.
22.9 x 1.7 x 15.2 cm, 0.55 kg

'… Cohen-Vrignaud's rich study demonstrates that there is still much to debate and discuss, and it will provide a valuable scholarly resource.' James Watt, Review of English Studies

This fascinating study reveals the extent to which the Orientalism of Byron and the Shelleys resonated with the reformist movement of the Romantic era. It documents how and why radicals like Bentham, Cobbett, Carlile, Hone and Wooler, among others in post-Revolutionary Britain, invoked Turkey, North Africa and Mughal India when attacking and seeking to change their government's domestic policies. Examining a broad archive ranging from satires, journalism, tracts, political and economic treatises, and public speeches, to the exotic poetry and fictions of canonical Romanticism, Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud shows that promoting colonization was not Orientalism's sole ideological function. Equally vital was its aesthetic and rhetorical capacity to alienate the people's affection from their rulers and fuel popular opposition to regressive taxation, penal cruelty, police repression, and sexual regulation.

Introduction: radical Orientalism and the rights of man
1. Cruel and unusual romance: Beckford, Byron, and the abomination of violence
2. Reading the Oriental Riot Act: petition, assembly, and Shelley's constitutional sublime
3. Splendors and miseries of the British Sultanate: economic Orientalism, inequality, and radical satire
4. Reasoning like a Turk: indolence and fatalism in Sardanapalus and The Last Man
5. Byronic infidelity and despotic individuality: sex, religion, and free agency
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: International relations [JPS], Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]