Late Victorian Orientalism is a work of scholarly research pushing forward disciplines into new areas of enquiry. This collection of essays tries to redefine the task of interpreting the East in the late nineteenth century taking as a starting point Said’s Orientalism in order to investigate the visual, fantasised, and imperialist representations of the East, as well as the most exemplary translations of Oriental poems. The Victorians envisioned the East in many different modes or Orientalisms since as Said suggested ‘[t]here were, perhaps, as many Orientalisms as Orientalists.’ 

By combining together Western and Oriental modes of art, this study is not only aimed at filling a gap in Victorian and Oriental studies but also at broadening the audiences it is intended for. Edward FitzGerald, William Bell Scott, the Brontë sisters, William Holman Hunt, D. G. Rossetti, William Morris, John La Farge, Algernon Swinburne, Walter Pater, the anonymous author of the Hongkong and the Hongkonians, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Rudyard Kipling, William Butler Yeats, Wilfred Thesiger, and Eric Newby play such a prominent role in the Oriental debate. By offering an extended discussion of their Oriental writings, this book will appeal to and benefit a wider range of audiences.

The subject range of this volume of essays on late Victorian Orientalism explores nineteenth-century modes of art which position themselves as instruments of knowledge of the Orient. The contributors deploy variegated tools derived from textual studies and visual culture research in order to explore the many ways in which the late Victorians envisioned the East. It is this combined approach which makes possible the reconsideration of Orientalist literature, art and cinema.

Eleonora Sasso is Associate Professor in English at the G. d’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy. Her major research fields include Victorian literature and culture, the Pre-Raphaelites, cognitive linguistics, intersemiotic and audio-visual translation, and Canadian studies.

Introduction; Chapter I, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, ‘FitzGerald’s Timelines’; Chapter II,  Florence Boos, ‘Empires and Scapegoats: The Pre-Raphaelites in the Near East’; Chapter III,  Eleonora Sasso, ‘aja’ib, mutalibun, and hur al-ayan: Rossetti, Morris, Swinburne and the Arabian Nights’; Chapter IV, Andrea Mariani, ‘The Use of Contradictions in John La Farge’s Prismatic Syncretism’; Chapter V, Elisa Bizzotto, ‘ “Strange webs with Eastern merchants”: The Orient of Aesthetic Poetry’; Chapter VI, Miriam Sette, ‘Rudyard Kipling, The Mark of the Beast and the Elusive Monkey’; Chapter VII, Christopher Ainslie Cowell, ‘Borrowed Verses: Code and Representation Within the First Travelogue of the City of Hong Kong, 1841-2’; Chapter VIII, Ben Cocking, ‘Newby and Thesiger: Humour and Lament in the Hindu Kush’; Chapter IX, Fabrizio Impellizzeri, ‘The Exoticism of Téchiné’s Les Sœurs Brontë: The Dream of an Impossible Elsewhere’; Bibliography; Index.

‘This collection of thoughtful and original essays refi nes the way we think about Orientalism, demonstrating how late Victorian writers and artists virtually internalised the imperial project. In these essays, the political is the personal, the public is the private and aesthetic pleasure is not innocent.’ —John M. Ganim, Distinguished Professor of English, University of California, Riverside, USA, and Author of Medievalism and Orientalism

The nine essays collected in Late Victorian Orientalism: Representations of the East in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Art, and Culture from the Pre-Raphaelites to John La Farge offer several riches, especially those that truly fall into the category delineated by the collection’s title. Several chapters focus fruitfully on material that all would agree falls under the subject of Victorian culture, if not exclusively its late period.- Barry Milligan, Victorian Studies, Volume 64, Number 2, Winter 2022, pp. 325-326