Edited by

el eonor a
sasso

l ate victorian
orientalism
representations of the east in
nineteenth-century literature,
art and culture from the
pre-raphaelites to
john la farge
i

Late Victorian Orientalism

ii
iii

Late Victorian Orientalism

Representations of the East in
Nineteenth-Century Literature, Art
and Culture from the Pre-Raphaelites
to John La Farge

Eleonora Sasso
iv

Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© 2020 Eleonora Sasso editorial matter and selection;

individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-327-8 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-327-2 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

v

CONTENTS

List of Figures vii

Notes on Contributors ix

Introduction 1
Eleonora Sasso
Chapter 1. FitzGerald’s timelines 11
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
Chapter 2. Empires and scapegoats: The Pre-Raphaelites
in the Near East 21
Florence S. Boos
Chapter 3. Aja’ib, mutalibun and hur al-ayn: Rossetti, Morris,
Swinburne and the Arabian Nights 51
Eleonora Sasso
Chapter 4. The use of contradictions in John La Farge’s
prismatic syncretism 79
Andrea Mariani
Chapter 5. ‘Strange webs with Eastern merchants’: The
Orient of aesthetic poetry 101
Elisa Bizzotto
Chapter 6. Rudyard Kipling, The Mark of the Beast and the
elusive monkey 123
Miriam Sette
Chapter 7. Borrowed verses: Code and representation
within the first travelogue of the city of Hong
Kong, 1841–42 133
Christopher Cowell
vi

vi LATE VICTORIAN ORIENTALISM

Chapter 8. Newby and Thesiger: Humour and lament

in the Hindu Kush 163
Ben Cocking
Chapter 9. The exoticism of Téchiné’s Les Sœurs Brontë:
The dream of an impossible elsewhere 183
Fabrizio Impellizzeri

Bibliography 207
Index 219