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Book Fables of the East

Download or read book Fables of the East written by Ros Ballaster and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2005-10-20 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fables of the East is the first anthology to provide textual examples of representations of oriental cultures in the early modern period drawn from a variety of genres: travel writing, histories, and fiction. Organized according to genre in order to illustrate the diverse shapes the oriental tale adopted in the period, the extracts cover the popular sequence of oriental tales, the pseudo-oriental tale, travels and history, and letter fictions. Authors represented range from the familiar - Joseph Addison, Horace Walpole, Montesquieu, Oliver Goldsmith - to authors of great popularity in their own time who have since faded in reputation such as James Ridley, Alexander Dow, and Eliza Haywood. The selection has been devised to call attention to the diversity in the ways that different oriental cultures are represented to English readers. Readers of this anthology will be able to identify a contrast between the luxury, excess, and sexuality associated with Islamic Turkey, Persia, and Mughal India and the wisdom, restraint, and authority invested in Brahmin India and Confucian China. Fables of the East redraws the cultural map we have inherited of the eighteenth century, demonstrating contemporary interest in gentile and 'idolatrous' religions, in Confucianism and Buddhism especially, and that the construction of the Orient in the western imagination was not exclusively one of an Islamic Near and Middle East. Ros Ballster's introduction addresses the importance of the idea of 'fable' to traditions of narrative and representations of the East. Each text is accompanied by explanatory head and footnotes, also provided is a glossary of oriental terms and places that were familiar to the texts' eighteenth-century readers.

Book Folktales and Fairy Tales  4 volumes

Download or read book Folktales and Fairy Tales 4 volumes written by Anne E. Duggan Ph.D. and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-02-12 with total page 1751 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Encyclopedic in its coverage, this one-of-a-kind reference is ideal for students, scholars, and others who need reliable, up-to-date information on folk and fairy tales, past and present. Folktales and fairy tales have long played an important role in cultures around the world. They pass customs and lore from generation to generation, provide insights into the peoples who created them, and offer inspiration to creative artists working in media that now include television, film, manga, photography, and computer games. This second, expanded edition of an award-winning reference will help students and teachers as well as storytellers, writers, and creative artists delve into this enchanting world and keep pace with its past and its many new facets. Alphabetically organized and global in scope, the work is the only multivolume reference in English to offer encyclopedic coverage of this subject matter. The four-volume collection covers national, cultural, regional, and linguistic traditions from around the world as well as motifs, themes, characters, and tale types. Writers and illustrators are included as are filmmakers and composers—and, of course, the tales themselves. The expert entries within volumes 1 through 3 are based on the latest research and developments while the contents of volume 4 comprises tales and texts. While most books either present readers with tales from certain countries or cultures or with thematic entries, this encyclopedia stands alone in that it does both, making it a truly unique, one-stop resource.

Book The Arabian Nights in Historical Context

Download or read book The Arabian Nights in Historical Context written by Saree Makdisi and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2008-11-13 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 300 hundred years following the translation of The Arabian Nights into French and English, a chain of editions, compilations, translations, and variations has circled the globe. Here scholars from across the world reassess the influence of the Nights in Enlightenment and Romantic literature and beyond.

Book Scheherazade s Children

    Book Details:
  • Author : Philip F. Kennedy
  • Publisher : NYU Press
  • Release : 2013-11-08
  • ISBN : 1479840319
  • Pages : 468 pages

Download or read book Scheherazade s Children written by Philip F. Kennedy and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2013-11-08 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scheherazade’s Children gathers together leading scholars to explore the reverberations of the tales of the Arabian Nights across a startlingly wide and transnational range of cultural endeavors. The contributors, drawn from a wide array of disciplines, extend their inquiries into the book’s metamorphoses on stage and screen as well as in literature—from India to Japan, from Sanskrit mythology to British pantomime, from Baroque opera to puppet shows. Their highly original research illuminates little-known manifestations of the Nights, and provides unexpected contexts for understanding the book’s complex history. Polemical issues are thereby given unprecedented and enlightening interpretations. Organized under the rubrics of Translating, Engaging, and Staging, these essays view the Nights corpus as a uniquely accretive cultural bundle that absorbs the works upon which it has exerted influence. In this view, the Arabian Nights is a dynamic, living and breathing cross-cultural phenomenon that has left its mark on fields as disparate as the European novel and early Indian cinema. While scholarly, the writers’ approach is also lively and entertaining, and the book is richly illustrated with unusual materials to deliver a sparkling and highly original exploration of the Arabian Nights’ radiating influence on world literature, performance, and culture.

Book Palgrave Advances in Byron Studies

Download or read book Palgrave Advances in Byron Studies written by J. Stabler and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-03-14 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection presents twelve outstanding new essays on Byron by leading critics from the USA, Canada and the UK including Steven Bruhm, Peter Cochran, Paul Curtis, Caroline Franklin, Peter Kitson, Ghislaine McDayter, Tim Morton, David Punter and Pamela Kao, Michael Simpson, Philip Shaw, Nanora Sweet and Susan Wolfson.

Book A Taste for China

    Book Details:
  • Author : Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins
  • Publisher : Oxford University Press
  • Release : 2013-05-23
  • ISBN : 0199950989
  • Pages : 297 pages

Download or read book A Taste for China written by Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-23 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A Taste for China' offers an account of how literature of the long eighteenth century generated a model of English selfhood dependent on figures of China. It shows how various genres of writing in this period call upon 'things Chinese' to define the tasteful English subject of modernity. Chinoiserie is no mere exotic curiosity in this culture, but a potent, multivalent sign of England's participation in a cosmopolitan world order.

Book The Sum of All Heresies

Download or read book The Sum of All Heresies written by Frederick Quinn and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2008 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Quinn traces the Western image of Islam from its earliest days to recent times. It establishes four basic themes around which the image of Islam gravitates throughout history in this portrayal of Islam in literature, art, music, and popular culture.

Book Dimensions of Transformation in the Ottoman Empire from the Late Medieval Age to Modernity

Download or read book Dimensions of Transformation in the Ottoman Empire from the Late Medieval Age to Modernity written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-08-04 with total page 515 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is dedicated to Metin Kunt, which primarily examines diverse cases of changes throughout Ottoman history. Both specialist and non-specialist readers will explore and understand the complexities concerning the longevity as well as the tenacity of the Ottoman Empire.

Book Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds

Download or read book Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds written by L. McJannet and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-08-29 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this book analyze a range of genres and considers geographical areas beyond the Ottoman Empire to deepen our post-Saidian understanding of the complexity of real and imagined "traffic" between England and the "Islamic worlds" it encountered and constructed.

Book The Persian Mirror

    Book Details:
  • Author : Susan Mokhberi
  • Publisher : Oxford University Press
  • Release : 2019-10-21
  • ISBN : 0190884800
  • Pages : 224 pages

Download or read book The Persian Mirror written by Susan Mokhberi and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-21 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Persian Mirror explores France's preoccupation with Persia in the seventeenth century. Long before Montesquieu's Persian Letters, French intellectuals, diplomats and even ordinary Parisians were fascinated by Persia and eagerly consumed travel accounts, fairy tales, and the spectacle of the Persian ambassador's visit to Paris and Versailles in 1715. Using diplomatic sources, fiction and printed and painted images, The Persian Mirror describes how the French came to see themselves in Safavid Persia. In doing so, it revises our notions of orientalism and the exotic and suggests that early modern Europeans had more nuanced responses to Asia than previously imagined.

Book Foreignness and Selfhood

Download or read book Foreignness and Selfhood written by Mengmeng Yan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-05-08 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In inviting a rethinking of ideas of foreignness and selfhood, this book explores Sino-British encounters in eighteenth-century English literature, providing detailed critical and literary analysis of individual texts pertaining to China from this period. The author provides a synthesis of approaches to China in eighteenth-century English literature, involving fictional writing related to China, adaptations of Chinese source texts, and translations of Chinese literary works. By discussing various writings about tea and tea-drinking, Arthur Murphy’s The Orphan of China (1759), Oliver Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World (1760–62), and Thomas Percy’s Hau Kiou Choaan (1761), she highlights the significance of reading these texts not simply as documents of a historical kind, but as texts that are worthy of literary and artistic attention on the basis of their rich variety in genre, style, and themes. The author proposes that Chinese and British cultures are not antithetical entities: they exist in relation to one another and create possibilities in the continuing appreciation of diversity amidst a drive to universality. This study will be primarily helpful to university students and professors of English literature, comparative literature, and history worldwide.

Book Looking East

    Book Details:
  • Author : G. Maclean
  • Publisher : Springer
  • Release : 2007-09-05
  • ISBN : 0230591841
  • Pages : 310 pages

Download or read book Looking East written by G. Maclean and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-09-05 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking East examines how English encounters with the Ottoman Empire helped shape national identities and imperial ambitions. Engagingly written in an accessible style, this book demonstrates how the so-called 'conflict of civilizations' separating the Muslim East from the Christian West is a false and dangerous myth.

Book Borges  Buddhism and World Literature

Download or read book Borges Buddhism and World Literature written by Dominique Jullien and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-01-04 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book follows the renunciation story in Borges and beyond, arguing for its centrality as a Borgesian compositional trope and as a Borgesian prism for reading a global constellation of texts. The renunciation story at the heart of Buddhism, that of a king who leaves his palace to become an ascetic, fascinated Borges because of its cross-cultural adaptability and metamorphic nature, and because it resonated so powerfully across philosophy, politics and aesthetics. From the story and its many variants, Borges’s essays formulated a 'morphological' conception of literature (borrowing the idea from Goethe), whereby a potentially infinite number of stories were generated by transformation of a finite number of 'archetypes'. The king-and-ascetic encounter also tells a powerful political story, setting up a confrontation between power and authority; Borges’s own political predicament is explored against the rich background of truth-telling renouncers. In its poetic variant, the renunciation archetype morphs into stories about art and artists, with renunciation a key requirement of the creative process: the discussion weaves in and out of Borges to highlight modern writers’ debt to asceticism. Ultimately, the enigmatic appeal of the renunciation story aligns it with the open-endedness of modern parables.

Book Orientalism and Literature

Download or read book Orientalism and Literature written by Geoffrey P. Nash and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-14 with total page 674 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Orientalism and Literature discusses a key critical concept in literary studies and how it assists our reading of literature. It reviews the concept's evolution: how it has been explored, imagined and narrated in literature. Part I considers Orientalism's origins and its geographical and multidisciplinary scope, then considers the major genres and trends Orientalism inspired in the literary-critical field such as the eighteenth-century Oriental tale, reading the Bible, and Victorian Oriental fiction. Part II recaptures specific aspects of Edward Said's Orientalism: the multidisciplinary contexts and scholarly discussions it has inspired (such as colonial discourse, race, resistance, feminism and travel writing). Part III deliberates upon recent and possible future applications of Orientalism, probing its currency and effectiveness in the twenty-first century, the role it has played and continues to play in the operation of power, and how in new forms, neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia, it feeds into various genres, from migrant writing to journalism.

Book Stranger Magic

    Book Details:
  • Author : Marina Warner
  • Publisher : Harvard University Press
  • Release : 2012-03-01
  • ISBN : 0674068424
  • Pages : 521 pages

Download or read book Stranger Magic written by Marina Warner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our foremost theorist of myth, fairytales, and folktales explores the magical realm of the imagination where carpets fly, objects speak, dreams reveal hidden truths, and genies grant prophetic wishes. Stranger Magic examines the wondrous tales of the Arabian Nights, their profound impact on the West, and the progressive exoticization of magic since the eighteenth century, when the first European translations appeared. The Nights seized European readers' imaginations during the siècle des Lumières, inspiring imitations, spoofs, turqueries, extravaganzas, pantomimes, and mauresque tastes in dress and furniture. Writers from Voltaire to Goethe to Borges, filmmakers from Raoul Walsh on, and countless authors of children's books have adapted its stories. What gives these tales their enduring power to bring pleasure to readers and audiences? Their appeal, Marina Warner suggests, lies in how the stories' magic stimulates the creative activity of the imagination. Their popularity during the Enlightenment was no accident: dreams, projections, and fantasies are essential to making the leap beyond the frontiers of accepted knowledge into new scientific and literary spheres. The magical tradition, so long disavowed by Western rationality, underlies modernity's most characteristic developments, including the charmed states of brand-name luxury goods, paper money, and psychoanalytic dream interpretation. In Warner's hands, the Nights reveal the underappreciated cultural exchanges between East and West, Islam and Christianity, and cast light on the magical underpinnings of contemporary experience, where mythical principles, as distinct from religious belief, enjoy growing acceptance. These tales meet the need for enchantment, in the safe guise of oriental costume.

Book Babylon Under Western Eyes

    Book Details:
  • Author : Andrew Scheil
  • Publisher : University of Toronto Press
  • Release : 2016-01-01
  • ISBN : 1442637331
  • Pages : 360 pages

Download or read book Babylon Under Western Eyes written by Andrew Scheil and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Babylon under Western Eyes examines the mythic legacy of ancient Babylon, the Near Eastern city which has served western culture as a metaphor for power, luxury, and exotic magnificence for more than two thousand years. Sifting through the many references to Babylon in biblical, classical, medieval, and modern texts, Andrew Scheil uses Babylon's remarkable literary ubiquity as the foundation for a thorough analysis of the dynamics of adaptation and allusion in western literature. Touching on everything from Old English poetry to the contemporary apocalyptic fiction of the "Left Behind" series, Scheil outlines how medieval Christian society and its cultural successors have adopted Babylon as a political metaphor, a degenerate archetype, and a place associated with the sublime. Combining remarkable erudition with a clear and accessible style, Babylon under Western Eyes is the first comprehensive examination of Babylon's significance within the pantheon of western literature and a testimonial to the continuing influence of biblical, classical, and medieval paradigms in modern culture.

Book Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal

Download or read book Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal written by Faith E. Beasley and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the prevailing images of India derived from nineteenth-century "orientalism," Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal identifies and explores the traces that exposure to India left on the cultural artifacts and mindset of France's "Great Century."