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New Perspectives on Sir Richard Burton - Orientalism, the Cannibal Club and Victorian Ideas of Sex, Race and Gender (Hardcover)
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New Perspectives on Sir Richard Burton - Orientalism, the Cannibal Club and Victorian Ideas of Sex, Race and Gender (Hardcover)
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Total price: R2,504
Discovery Miles: 25 040
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A research monograph on the mid-Victorian rise of Sir Richard
Burton, Orientalism and the phenomenon of the Cannibal Club is
overdue as, although it has been dealt with superficially many
times, there has never been a book length treatment which focuses
clearly on the whole arc of its historical development and its
relevance to the undercutting of the standard view of the
Victorians as almost exclusively prudish and deeply moralistic
about sex and pornography. Furthermore, the importance of the
Cannibal Club extends beyond the subject of sexuality and into the
fields of race and gender. This book length treatment gives the
opportunity to examine the ways in which this secretive men's club
both reflected and helped to create some extreme Victorian ideas
about race, sex and gender which, although a background theme to
the more acceptable moral righteousness of the period, nevertheless
has reverberated with powerful emphasis, even down to the present
day. The result of this has been to create an ambiguous, but
overlapping, secret place where normally "respectable" citizens
might indulge their taste for extreme and elitist views in
"deviant" but socially permitted ways. This is an interest that
grew out of Dr.Wallen's research on Richard Burton who was a
prominent member and leading light of the club. The Cannibal Club
was founded in 1863 and grew out of the split between monogenists
and polygenists in the Ethnological Society which had been formed
in London in 1843. The monogenists, following Darwin's lead,
believed that man, in spite of certain differences, constituted a
single species and they tended towards liberal politics. The
polygenists, on the other hand, believed in a multiple genesis of
man and were a strongly conservative group with racist tendencies.
The victory of the monogenists in the Ethnological Society led
James Hunt and Richard Burton to set up a rival organisation called
"The Anthropological Society of London" with polygenist theories
and a strong belief in the minute collection of data as a means of
proving the differences between races. The Society was a supporter
of such pseudo-scientific practices as phrenology and the
measurement of skull size and shape with craniometers and other
instruments of anatomical measurement. During the American Civil
War, the Anthropological Society was a strong supporter of the
Confederacy and its pro-slavery policies. An off-shoot of the
Anthropological Society was the Cannibal Club which promoted the
beliefs of the Society in a more personal and Dionysian way (as
with most men's clubs of the Victorian period, large quantities of
alcohol were imbibed during the club's meetings). The basic idea
was that a group of intelligent and intellectually advanced English
gentlemen should celebrate their innate superiority over other
racial and social groups through the discussion of topics that were
normally off-bounds in academic circles. The topics for debate
included sex, pornography, religion and race. Prominent members
included Hunt, Burton, Swinburne and Monckton Milnes (Lord
Houghton) . The style and tenor of the club's meetings can be
gauged by the fact that its symbol was a mace carved to resemble an
African head chewing on a thigh bone. Swinburne even wrote a
Cannibal Catechism which was thought of as a kind of club anthem.
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