English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia
Journal Data
| Type | SOURCE_BOOK |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan (GB) |
| ISBN-13 | 9780230106222 |
| Open Library | OL26471453W |
| Total publications | 9 |
| Coverage period | 2009 - 2010 |
| Language | EN |
This unique collection of essays examines the complex significations of 'Asia' in the literary and cultural production of Early Modern England. Contributors come from a range of backgrounds to bring a
English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia
Indian and Amazon
Asia, under its wonted rubric of the exotic Orient, makes its way into the text of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a non sequitur, the surprise that Greece is not hegemonic or omnipresent, or the sole locus of the drama. “Why art thou here, / Come from the farthest step of India?” (2.1.68-69), Titania asks Oberon in their first dialog under moonlight. 1 Her free association of India with sexual license is a predilection that many of Shakespeare’s co…
Westward to the Orient
The theme of scientific utopianism is often extracted from Francis Bacon’s dream in New Atlantis of a national college whose ends were “the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things” and “the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire.” 1 Meanwhile, scholarly discussion has been all but silent on what seems to be the lesser implications of a historically charged trade route that grounded the same narrative. This “Work Unfinished,” which Baco…
Persia, Tartaria, and Pamphilia
This paper seeks to explicate the imaginary geographies of Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621) by tracing conflicting early modern genealogies of the Tartar—conventionally represented as issuing from Central Asia during the Middle Ages and threatening Western Europe up to the early modern period—in relation to English engagement with the Ottoman and Safavid empires around the turn of the seventeenth century. 1 Wroth’s Urania i…
Introduction
Critical readings of the English Renaissance have recently shown a marked increase in interest in the literary representation of foreign lands, an interest that can be traced in part to the influence of postcolonial criticism. Many of these readings have focused their attention on topics of nationhood, English responses to foreign cultures and geopolitical spaces, the emergence of expansionist dreams and ambitions, and the structures of early mod…
“Turning Turk,” Early Modern English Orientalism, and Shakespeare’s Othello
In commemorating four hundred years of William shakespeare's Othello, we find ourselves today, like English society then, a consortium of Western cultures poised to counter Muslim terrorist aggression. Whereas early modern Europeans feared the massive advance of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, the twenty-first century world is preoccupied with threats posed by fringe elements of Islamic culture—paramilitary or political organizations like Al Qaeda, H…
Marlowe’s Asia and the Feminization of Conquest
In 1507, Martin WaldseemüLler In His Cosmographiae Introductio proposed the name "America" for Columbus's newly discovered land on the explicit grounds that "I do not see why anyone should object to its being called after Americus the discoverer, a man of natural wisdom, Land of Americus or America, since both Europe and Asia have derived their names from women."1 Just over a hundred years later, in 1614, Thomas Campion's masque for the wedding o…
Object Protocols
At one point in his account of his stay in India, Sir Thomas Roe, ambassador from the court of King James I to the Mughal Emperor Jahangir, is asked by the emperor to show him his locket. Inside the little ornament is a portrait of Roe's wife. Jahangir inquires about the identity of the woman in the portrait and Roe, for some inexplicable reason, describes her as a dead friend (Roe 222), when in fact it was his wife, very much alive, whom he had …
The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia
This unique collection of essays examines the complex significations of 'Asia' in the literary and cultural production of Early Modern England. Contributors come from a range of backgrounds to bring a
No prominent publications on this page.
Indian and Amazon
Asia, under its wonted rubric of the exotic Orient, makes its way into the text of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a non sequitur, the surprise that Greece is not hegemonic or omnipresent, or the sole locus of the drama. “Why art thou here, / Come from the farthest step of India?” (2.1.68-69), Titania asks Oberon in their first dialog under moonlight. 1 Her free association of India with sexual license is a predilection that many of Shakespeare’s co…
Westward to the Orient
The theme of scientific utopianism is often extracted from Francis Bacon’s dream in New Atlantis of a national college whose ends were “the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things” and “the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire.” 1 Meanwhile, scholarly discussion has been all but silent on what seems to be the lesser implications of a historically charged trade route that grounded the same narrative. This “Work Unfinished,” which Baco…
Persia, Tartaria, and Pamphilia
This paper seeks to explicate the imaginary geographies of Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621) by tracing conflicting early modern genealogies of the Tartar—conventionally represented as issuing from Central Asia during the Middle Ages and threatening Western Europe up to the early modern period—in relation to English engagement with the Ottoman and Safavid empires around the turn of the seventeenth century. 1 Wroth’s Urania i…
Introduction
Critical readings of the English Renaissance have recently shown a marked increase in interest in the literary representation of foreign lands, an interest that can be traced in part to the influence of postcolonial criticism. Many of these readings have focused their attention on topics of nationhood, English responses to foreign cultures and geopolitical spaces, the emergence of expansionist dreams and ambitions, and the structures of early mod…
“Turning Turk,” Early Modern English Orientalism, and Shakespeare’s Othello
In commemorating four hundred years of William shakespeare's Othello, we find ourselves today, like English society then, a consortium of Western cultures poised to counter Muslim terrorist aggression. Whereas early modern Europeans feared the massive advance of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, the twenty-first century world is preoccupied with threats posed by fringe elements of Islamic culture—paramilitary or political organizations like Al Qaeda, H…
Marlowe’s Asia and the Feminization of Conquest
In 1507, Martin WaldseemüLler In His Cosmographiae Introductio proposed the name "America" for Columbus's newly discovered land on the explicit grounds that "I do not see why anyone should object to its being called after Americus the discoverer, a man of natural wisdom, Land of Americus or America, since both Europe and Asia have derived their names from women."1 Just over a hundred years later, in 1614, Thomas Campion's masque for the wedding o…
Object Protocols
At one point in his account of his stay in India, Sir Thomas Roe, ambassador from the court of King James I to the Mughal Emperor Jahangir, is asked by the emperor to show him his locket. Inside the little ornament is a portrait of Roe's wife. Jahangir inquires about the identity of the woman in the portrait and Roe, for some inexplicable reason, describes her as a dead friend (Roe 222), when in fact it was his wife, very much alive, whom he had …
The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia
This unique collection of essays examines the complex significations of 'Asia' in the literary and cultural production of Early Modern England. Contributors come from a range of backgrounds to bring a
English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia