Contents

  1. Acknowledgments

  2. Introduction

  3. 1 To instruct without displeasing: Percy Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam and Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer

    1. Instruction in The Revolt of Islam

    2. Tyranny: the Orient’s chief export

    3. Tyranny’s comrades: religion and sexism

    4. Orientalism and Shelley’s poetics

    5. Morals vs. materials: instruction and pleasure in Thalaba the Destroyer

    6. The desert, Islam: foreignness as a hermeneutic category

    7. Foreignness general and particular: character as archetype

    8. Extremes: too many notes?

    9. Southey and his readers: delighted, informed, or distressed

    10. Representation and the “Arabesque ornament”

  4. 2 Representing, misrepresenting, not representing: Victor Hugo’s Les Orientales and Alfred de Musset’s “Namouna”

    1. Hugo’s preface: poetic ideals and the Orient as subject

    2. “La Douleur du pacha”: the Orient as origin or as end

    3. “Adieux de l’hôtesse arabe”: stasis

    4. “Novembre”: returning to Paris, the self, and mimesis

    5. Hugo’s critics: E.J. Chételat

    6. George Gordon Byron’s Don Juan: “But what’s reality?”

    7. “Namouna”: fragmentary representation

    8. No narrative, no representation

    9. Authority, referents, and representation

    10. The Middle East: “impossible à décrire”

  5. 3 Orientalist poetics and the nature of the Middle East

    1. William Wordsworth and the nature of the Middle East

    2. Felicia Hemans’s ambivalence

    3. Truth in illustrating Robert Southey and Thomas Moore

    4. Leconte de Lisle: “Le Désert,” “le désert du monde”

    5. Théophile Gautier: the composite desert

    6. “In deserto”: European nature in absentia

    7. Out of the desert: Byron’s “Turkish Tales”

    8. Matthew Arnold in Bukhara: nature in the Middle Eastern city

    9. Alfred Tennyson’s Basra: natural phenomena and urban construction

    10. Orientalist poetics, Oscar Wilde

  6. 4 The Orient’s art, orienting art

    1. A confederation of the Middle East and art: Wordsworth

    2. The Middle East as a source of art: Leconte de Lisle

    3. Middle Eastern art and Gautier’s imagination

    4. Nightingales and roses I: Walter Savage Landor and oriental literature

    5. Nightingales and roses II: Moore and the Orient as an ideal

    6. Hemans’s Middle Eastern models

    7. Grounding a poetics in the 1001 Nights: Tennyson

    8. The Orient and Tennyson’s p(a)lace of art

    9. Gautier’s orientalist poetics and art for art’s sake

    10. Orientalist poetics, Oscar Wilde: culmination

  7. Bibliography

  8. Index