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Pierre Loti and the Theatricality of Desire offers an original analysis of patterns of unconscious desire observable in the life and work of the French orientalist writer Pierre Loti. It aims to reconcile attitudes and conduct that have been regarded as contradictory and not amenable to analysis by locating the unconscious urges that motivate them. It looks at the ambiguous feelings Loti expresses towards his mother, the conflicting desires inherent in his bisexuality, and his deeply ambiguous sense of a cultural identity as expressed through his cross-cultural transvestism. The political implications of this reappraisal are also considered, offering a potential reassessment of the apparentl...
Presenting a critical, yet innovative, perspective on the cultural interactions between the "East" and the "West", this book questions the role of travel in the production of knowledge and in the construction of the idea of the "Islamic city". This volume brings together authors from various disciplines, questioning the role of Western travel writing in the production of knowledge about the East, particularly focusing on the cities of the Muslim world. Instead of concentrating on a specific era, chapters span the Medieval and Modern eras in order to present the transformation of both the idea of the "Islamic city" and also the act of traveling and travel writing. Missions to the East, whethe...
Provides the listing of books, articles, and book reviews concerned with French literature since 1885. This is a reference source in the study of modern French literature and culture. It contains nearly 8,800 entries.
Global Women, Colonial Ports is a transnational history of state-regulated prostitution in the Middle East and North Africa between the two world wars. Beginning with international efforts to eradicate traffic in women and children, Liat Kozma examines French and British policies regarding local and foreign prostitutes in the region and shows how these policies affected and interacted with global migration routes of prostitutes and procurers. In so doing, she reveals how colonial domination mediated global mobility of people, practices, and ideas. Kozma weaves together the perspectives of colonial and local feminists with those of medical doctors, demonstrating that debates on prostitution were globalized and that transnational networks of knowledge and activism existed. She also explores the League of Nations' involvement in this social issue. As a history of the Middle East, the book joins recent scholarship on modern globalization and the integration of the region in global economic, activist, social, and religious interconnectedness.
This book examines the transnational phenomenon of Japonisme in the exoticist and “autoexoticist” literature of the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the way in which reciprocal processes of transcultural acquisition – by Japan and from Japan – were portrayed in the medium of literature, the book illustrates how literary Japonisme and the wider processes whereby Japan, with its alien exotic culture and unique refined aestheticism, was absorbing Western civilization in its own way in the late nineteenth century at the same time as the phenomenon of Japonisme was occurring in Western fine arts, which were inspired by traditional Japanese artistic practices. Specifically, the book focuses on the literary works of Lafcadio Hearn and Pierre Loti, who travelled from France and America, respectively, to Japan, and Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki, who in turn went, respectively, to Germany and England from Japan. Exploring the eclectic hybridity of Japan’s modernization during the late nineteenth century, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Japanese Studies, Postcolonial Studies and Comparative Literature.
Puccini's famous but controversial Madama Butterfly reflects a practice of 'temporary marriage' between Western men and Japanese women in nineteenth-century treaty ports. Groos' book identifies the plot's origin in an eye-witness account and traces its transmission via John Luther Long's short story and David Belasco's play. Archival sources, many unpublished, reveal how Puccini and his librettists imbued the opera with differing constructions of the action and its heroine. Groos's analysis suggests how they constructed a 'contemporary' music-drama with multiple possibilities for interpreting the misalliance between a callous American naval officer and an impoverished fifteen-year-old geisha, providing a more complex understanding of the heroine's presumed 'marriage'. As an orientalizing tragedy with a racially inflected representation of Cio-Cio-San, the opera became a lightning rod for identity politics in Japan, while also stimulating decolonizing transpositions into indigenous theatre traditions such as Bunraku puppet theatre and Takarazuka musicals.
Few authors have led lives as interesting as that enjoyed by French novelist and travel writer Pierre Loti (1850–1923)—and still fewer have worked so hard to make their lives appear even more romantic than they already were. As a career officer in the French navy, Loti participated in expeditions that took him to locales which even today seem exotic, giving rise to four decades of novels, travelogues, and autobiographical narratives, some of which went through hundreds of editions in France and were translated into dozens of languages. And as Richard M. Berrong reveals in this colorful biography, the extravagances of Loti’s often very public private life were as interesting as his art....
The place of the Middle East in European heterosexual fantasy is well documented in the works of Edward Said and others, yet few have considered the male Anglo-European (and, later, American) writers, artists, travelers, and thinkers compelled to represent what, to their eyes, seemed to be an abundance of erotic relations between men in the Islamicate world. Whether feared or desired, the mere possibility of sexual contact with or between men in the Middle East has covertly underwritten much of the appeal and practice of the enterprise of Orientalism, frequently repeating yet just as often upending its assumed meanings. Traces of this undertow abound in European and Middle Eastern fiction, diaries, travel literature, erotica, ethnography, painting, photography, film, and digital media. Joseph Allen Boone explores these vast representations, linking European art to Middle Eastern sources largely unfamiliar to Western audiences and, in some cases, reproduced in this volume for the first time.