Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Readings of the Medieval Orient

Bücher

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Travel narratives and historical works shaped the perception of Muslims and the East in the Victorian and post-Victorian periods. The book discusses the troubled legacy drawing on the discourses on Muslims originating in the European Middle Ages, and locates the nineteenth-century texts concerning the Saracens and their lands in the liminal space between history and travel accounts. Drawing on the nineteenth-century models, the second part of the book looks at fictional works of the late twentieth century (but published before 9/11) which re-established the "Oriental obsession, " stimulating dread and resentment, and even more strongly setting the Civilized West against the Barbaric East. Here medieval metaphorical enemies of Mankind, the World, the Flesh and the Devil, reappear albeit in different contexts: the world of immigration, of white women desiring Muslim man, and the modern "freedom fighter.