Eastern Life, Present and Past
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23181654 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Harriet Martineau (corresponding author) |
| Editors | Geoffrey Nash (0000-0002-0258-2513) |
| Year | 2012 |
| Pages | 25-30 |
| Publication date | 2012-03-05 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | CHAPTER |
| Venue | Travellers to the Middle East from Burckhardt to Thesiger (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Anthem Press (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.7135/upo9781843318262.006 |
| OpenAlex | W612562010 |
| ISBN | 9781843318262 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 12 |
Martineau's life represents a triumph over early adversity. Overcoming poverty and ill health in childhood, and despite advancing deafness as an adult, she supported her siblings and established a career by writing for the Daily News and the Edinburgh Review. Born into a Unitarian family her radicalism – especially her antislavery principles and concern for the conditions of women – is incorporated into her travel writing, beginning with Society in America (1837), an account of a tour of both the southern and northern states of the USA. Martineau even went so far as to produce a manual for travellers, How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838). Her write up of her journeys in Egypt and Palestine of 1846–47, Eastern Life, Present and Past, appeared in 1848. As an observer of the East her Victorian social reformist principles and espousal of the ‘higher criticism’ of religion appeared to leave little room for her to connect with local people and their customs. She saw the world of the Middle East ‘as frozen in biblical history’ (Harper DLB/166: 255). Pointing out that only five of the twenty-four chapters of Eastern Life are concerned with ‘modern’ Egyptians, Billie Melman dubs Martineau as belonging to the ‘mythopically ethnocentric’ type of traveller: ‘Time and again she discloses her total lack of interest in the Muslim Orient and in contemporary Egypt’ (Melman 1992: 63, 242).
Ancient history · Criticism · Ethnocentrism · Political science · Sociology · Chinese history and philosophy · Gender Studies · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law
Harriet Martineau's Material Rebirth
Desexualizing the orient
Annie Marion MacLean, Feminist Pragmatist and Methodologist
Strangers in Every Port
Mapping the unknown
I'm Just a Pen
Harem life, west and east
Hygiene in the Harem
A History of the Jewish War
Photography and the Real
Textbooks, the History of Sociology, and the Sociological Stock of Knowledge
Martineau, Cobbe, and teleological progressivism
| Unique citing works | 12 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.32 |
| Citation span | 1989 - 2020 (32) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |