Romantic Orientalism and Islam: Southey, Shelley, Moore, and Byron

This dissertation proposes to evaluate the representation of the Islamic Orient in Romantic poetry. The emphasis is on the Orientalist poetry of four Romantic poets; Southey, Shelley, Tom Moore, and Byron. The main thrust of the study is to show how each one of them shares a common focus on the Islamic Orient, its culture, its ideology, and its people, which is predominantly conventional and stereotypical in its spirit. In their manipulation of the orient for their own literary and cultural purposes, in their representation of the West as a superior geo-cultural reality over the East, Southey, Shelley, Byron, and Moore employ images and rhetorical strategies which ensure their participation in an intertextual process of literary Orientalism which has been existing in the West since the Middle Ages. Their poetry, selected in this study, displays an astonishing uniformity of themes, ideas, and images about the Islamic Orient.; To understand the unanimity of opinion and ideas, the influence and implications of old writings and socio-political relations between the West and the East are stressed. It is argued that because the source of information and the frame of reference for most of these writers were the same, their knowledge and representation of Islam and the Muslims remain stereotypical. As their knowledge of the Islamic Orient is determined by these factors even poets, such as Byron, who travelled to the Near East and had a chance to experience the Muslim Orient from a close-up, find it difficult to disentangle themselves from the old myths and mis-conceptions rooted in Western literary tradition.; Moreover, to satisfy their personal and ideological needs and their reader's preconceived ideas and expectations, these poets continue subscribing to old myths and conventions even when they overtly attack what Southey calls "misrepresentation" by Western writers. Conventional distortions of Islam go hand in hand with the private fantasies of each poet. All of them establish in their poems two antithetical worlds, West/East, to which they ascribe good and evil characters respectively. Consequently, there emerges an image of the Orient which is conventional, exaggerated, an arbitrary product of their fantasies and their emotional needs, rather than an Orient which has a historical reality of its own.; The study is divided in five chapters. The first chapter presents an overview of English literature from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century indicating the recurrence of certain images and ideas about Islam and the Muslims throughout the centuries. The second chapter analyses Southey's epics. The third chapter deals with Shelley's The Revolt of Islam and Hellas. The fourth evaluates Tom Moore's Eastern romance Lalla Rook and The Loves of the Angels, and the last examines Byron's Turkish Tales and Don Juan.