This book explores how the Romantic poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Keats engages with tales and themes of the Orient.

It argues that they do so not only to interrogate their own imaginations, but also as a way of criticizing Europe's growing imperialism. For them the Orient is a projection of Europe's own fears and desires. It is therefore a charged setting in which to explore and contest the limits of the age's aesthetics, politics and culture. Being nearly always self-conscious and ironic, the poets' treatment of the Orient becomes itself a twinned criticism of 'Romantic' egotism and the Orientalism practised by earlier generations. The book goes further to claim that poems like Shelley's Revolt of Islam.

While postcolonial studies of Romantic-period literature have flourished in recent years, scholars have long neglected the extent of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's engagement with the Orient in both his literary and philsophical writings. Bringing together leading international writers, Coleridge, Romanticism and the Orient is the first substantial exploration of Coleridge's literary and scholarly representations of the east and the ways in which these were influenced by and went on to influence his own work and the orientalism of the Romanticists more broadly. Bringing together postcolonial, philsophical, historicist and literary-critical perspectives, this groundbreaking book develops a new understanding of 'Orientalism' that recognises the importance of colonial ideologies in Romantic representations of the East as well as appreciating the unique forms of meaning and value which authors such as Coleridge asscoiated with the Orient.

British Romanticism and the Literature of Human Interest explores the importance to Romantic literature of a concept of human interest. It examines a range of literary experiments to engage readers through subjects and styles that were at once "interesting" and that, in principle, were in their "interest." These experiments put in question relationships between poetry and prose; lyric and narrative; and literature and popular media. The book places literary works by a range of nineteenth-century writers including William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary and Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Matthew Arnold into dialogue with a variety of non-literary and paraliterary forms ranging from newspapers to footnotes. The book investigates the generic structures of Romantic literature and the negotiation of the status of literature in the period in relation to a new media landscape. It explores the self-theorization of Romantic literature and argues for its value to contemporary literary criticism.

Oriental Wells explores the manifold ways in which the East was a major source of inspiration for the British Romantic poets, who generously borrowed from the Eastern sources in their effort to reinvent the British poetic tradition. It examines the “orientalization” of Romantic poetry, using works of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Walter Savage Landor. Analyzing the Romantic poets' multifaceted engagement with the East, the book raises the questions: · What led Blake to formulate his thesis that “All Religions Are One”? · Why do Coleridge's poetry and the play Osorio echo some of the passages from Wilkins' translation of The Bhagvat-Geeta as well as other prominent Eastern religious texts? · What made Southey write his “Hindu epic” The Curse of Kehama and his “Islamic” tale Thalaba, the Destroyer? · What was the exact nature of the negotiations between William Jones' Orientalism and Wordsworth's poetics as formulated in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, The Prelude, and other poems? The book convincingly argues that the introduction of “cultural goods” from the East played a crucial role in shaping the form and substance of British Romanticism, while acknowledging that the Romantics' reception of the East was tempered by their ideological concerns and religious background.

'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.