Romanticism had its roots in fantasy and fed on myth'. So Roderick
Cavaliero introduces the European Romantic obsession with the
Orient.Cavaliero draws on a life-time's research in Romantic
literature and introduces a rich cast of leading Romantic
writers,artists,musicians and travellers,including Beckford,Byron,
Shelley,Walter Scott,Pierre Loti,Thomas Moore,Rossini,Eugene
Delacroix,Thackeray and Disraeli,and a host of other Romantics,who
were drawn to the Orient in the 18th and 19th centuries.They
luxuriate in its exotic sights,sounds,literature and,above all, in
the prevailing mythology.Cavaliero analyses the Romantic vision
where,as Byron writes, there are 'virgins soft as the roses they
twine',but lays bare an underlying vision of cruelty and
oppression, and of societies based on domestic or prisoner slavery
- anathema to the 19th-century Romantic. The overarching myth was
that of the Ottoman Empire,a huge and exotic superpower,an empire
to rival Rome,a major threat to Europe, with an invincible military
record ruled by a Sultan with absolute, even feckless, power of
life and death over his subjects who lived to 'delight his
senses'.But to the Romantics,fear of the absolute ruler was
overlaid by frissons of oriental luxury. Thus the Ottoman Sultans
were the heirs of the iconic Caliphate of Harun ar Rashid in the
fabulous Arabian Nights Entertainments.Coleridge's dream of the
Orient in Kubla Khan was not of the barbaric grandeur of the global
Mongol empire but that of a 'stately pleasure dome in Xanadu' among
incense-bearing trees and untroubled forests. Moore's Lalla Rookh
was set in his visionary vale of Kashmir and is a love story in 'a
land of kingfishers and golden orioles' with the backdrop of the
mighty Moghul Empire. Scott was obsessed by the chivalry of the
Crusades on both sides and Disraeli was fascinated by the interplay
of the Abrahamic faiths and the hopes of peace in the Holy Land.
Dualism runs through Romantic writing even when European
realpolitik and modern nationalism are involved - as in the Greek
revolt against Ottoman rule and the decline of Turkey as a great
power. But above all for the Romantics the Orient remained
mysterious and inviting. Cavaliero's Ottomania will delight all
readers interested in tales of the exotic Orient, and the
literature of the Romantic movement - a rich treasure-house of
poets, novelists and travellers.
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