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Victorian Literary Orientalism

APH Publishing house,New Delhi,2010

About the Book:

Victorian Literary Orientalism is the study of the image of Islam and Muslims in English literature up to Victorian age. The first two chapters provide a helpful overview of and context for appreciating the main trends, as reflected in Victorian works with a markedly Oriental element. Gifted with thorough knowledge of both Oriental culture and local colour and of the works of major Victorian writers namely, Arnold, Browning, Carlyle and Tennyson, the book explores the tradition of Victorian Literary Orientalism marked by the existence of two streams of thought in the period under review, one marked by a historical bias, as in Tennyson, and the other by a conciliatory liberalism in the works of Arnold and Carlyle. The book brings into sharper focus; Matthew Arnold’s work A Persian Passion Play, which has largely escaped critical attention. Carlyle’s positive view of Prophet Muhammed and Islam and Tennyson’s poetic corpus has been examined assiduously with a view to identifying Oriental material. A critical analysis of Browning’s Muleykeh points to the poet’s indebtness to Oriental sources. The book represents a substantial addition to the growing body of material on Western Literary Orientalism.

About the author:

Dr. Syed Faiz Zaidi obtained his M.A in English Literature and earned his Ph.D on Victorian writers’ Orientalism from Aligarh Muslim University, India. He has published several research papers on Victorian Literary Orientalism. His critique on Matthew Arnold’s A Persian Passion Play was acclaimed both in India and abroad and was read out by the author in the ‘First National Congress on Iranian studies’, in Tehran, Iran. He participated in US English Access Micro-Scholarship Teachers Workshop at Oregon State University, Corvallis and Washington D.C, United States of America in 2008. He has been teaching English at Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India since 2004.