Week 1. Travellers to the Middle East; Travellers from the Middle East

Mini Lecture

Seminar Readings:

Primary Sources:

1-Harriet Martineau, Eastern Life, Present and Past (1848) (see extracts from Geoffrey Nash, Travellers to the Middle East from Burckhardt to Thesiger: An Anthology (London: Anthem Press, 2009): 25-30.

2-Selection of paintings Scenes from the Harem from John Frederick Lewis in Chap. 6 ‘The Politics of Portraiture Behind the Veil,’ in Mary Roberts, Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature (Duke: Duke University Press, 2007).

Secondary Sources:

Nile Green, Introduction ‘Introducing Mr D’Arcy’s Persians: Iranians in Jane Austen’s England,’ in The Love of Strangers: What Six Muslim Students Learned in Jane Austen’s London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

Billie Melman, ‘Desexualizing the Orient: The Harem in English Travel writing by Women, 1763–1914,’ Mediterranean Historical Review 4, no. 2: 301-339

Mary Roberts, Chap. 2 ‘Mr Lewis’s Oriental Paradises’ and Chap. 4 ‘Being Seen’, in Intimate Outsiders: the Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature (Duke: Duke University Press, 2007).

Further Readings:

See also the bibliography on Orientalism and the Imperial Eye (Term 1).Link opens in a new window

Nicholas Tromans, ed., Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting (London: Tate, 2008).

Zeynep Çelik, ‘Colonialism, Orientalism and the Canon,’ Art Bulletin 78, no. 2 (1996): 202–205.

Joan Del Plato, From Slave Market to Paradise: The Harem Pictures of John Frederick Lewis and Their Traditions (Los Angeles: UCLA Press, 1987.

Joan Del Plato, Multiple Wives, Multiple Pleasures: Representing the Harem, 1800–1875 (Cranbury, Ontario: Associated University Presses, 2002).

Rana Kabbani, Europe’s Myths of Orient (London: Pandora, 1988).

Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996).

Reina Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004)

Paul and Janet Starkey, ed. Interpreting the Orient: Travellers in Egypt and the Near East (Reading, Ithaca Press, 2001)

Paul and Janet Starkey, eds., Pious Pilgrims, Discerning Travellers, Curious Tourists: Changing Patterns of Travel to the Middle East from Medieval to Modern Times (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2020)

Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1991.

Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Geoffrey P. Nash, ed. Orientalism and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Geoffrey P. Nash, From Empire to Orient: Travellers to the Middle East 1830-1926 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005).