Sataniczność kreacji bohatera w Arabie Juliusza Słowackiego

This article attempts to read Juliusz Słowacki’s Arab from the comparative perspective of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The protagonist of Słowacki’s oriental tale, who is a variation on the Byronic hero, also shows similarities with Milton’s Satan: unceasing motion, obsession of revenge, loneliness, axiological preference of evil. The analysis of those similarities creates a new interpretative context for Arab, which was hitherto regarded as a superficial study of the pathological psyche or a caricature of the Byronic model.

The Romance

This chapter demonstrates how nineteenth-century literature transcended religious frameworks and questioned the nature of male authority and feminine purity. Although the houri may have been based on assumptions about Islam, the term “houri” eventually was applied to Jewish and Christian women. The chapter surveys mentions of the houri in the form of the “Oriental tale” and argues that writers made use of the figure of the houri to present their own ideas of idealized Christian and Jewish women. Texts in the chapter include poems by Byron, Ivanhoe, Jane Eyre, Algerine Captive, Book of Khalid, engravings, and American monthly magazines for ladies.

Clichés orientalistes et stéréotypes formels dans un roman satirique : le cas de La vieille dame du riad de Fouad Laroui

This article analyses the novel “La vieille dame du riad” (2011) by Fouad Laroui, a Moroccan-Dutch writer of French expression. We examine the strategies (generic and intertextual) used by the novelist to ridicule the Orientalist prejudices which persist in the current time. Generic hybridity (the presence of some elements of the detective story, fantasy novel and oriental tale) is used to develop the satirical dimension of the novel.

Mahometan/Muslim: The Chronotope of the Oriental Tale

This chapter argues that we read the literary trend for the oriental tale that overtook England in the early part of the eighteenth century as one that extended beyond the metropolis. An essential element of the oriental tale, whether Antoine Galland and Grub Street’s Arabian Nights’ Entertainments or Francois de la Croix’s Turkish Tales, is the chronotope of the Mahometan—the imagined counterpart of the Ottoman or Mughal Muslim kings—a that figure defies Enlightenment modalities of ancient time and geographic origin. A ubiquitous figure in the English oriental tale, the Mahometan is constructed as a homeless potentate, a traveling merchant, an itinerant dervish, and a wanderer.

Who Is a Muslim?

Who is a Muslim? Orientalism and Literary Populisms argues that modern Urdu literature, from its inception in colonial institutions such as Fort William College, Calcutta, to its dominant forms in contemporary Pakistan—popular novels, short stories, television serials—is formed around a question that is and historically has been at the core of early modern and modern Western literatures. The question—who is a Muslim—is predominant in eighteenth-century literary and scholarly orientalist texts, the English oriental tale chief amongst them, but takes on new and dangerous meanings once it travels to the North-Indian colony, and later to Pakistan. A literary-historical study spanning some three centuries, this book argues that the modern Urdu literary formation, far from secular or progressive, has been shaped as the authority designate on the intertwined questions of piety, national identity, and citizenship, first in colonial India and subsequently in contemporary Pakistan.

Hindustani/Urdu: The Oriental Tale in the Colony

This chapter traces the journey of the oriental tale to the North-Indian colony as a prose form instrumental to the colonial exercise that refashions Urdu, once an elite, aesthetic register, into a modern vernacular language complete with a “literature” of its own. It examines how orientalists such as William Jones and John Gilchrist invented a modern Muslim identity in North India through the category of “literature.” It focuses, in particular, on Fort William College and its transformative effects on Urdu aesthetics.

A Feminist Reading of an Oriental Tale

Tales, which have an important place in the process of socialization, contain various ideological constructions like other narratives. This study aims to analyses an important tale of Turkey's tale corpus named “Crystal Manor and Diamond Ship” by the terms of feminist critics. This tale is considered among the tales of Anatolian field and is similar to some western tales such as Rapunzel. However, in terms of subject positions, which are one of the focal points of feminist criticism, the main female character, unlike most fairy tales, seems to be planning and implementing the actions that advance the plot, rather than waiting for a man to rescue her.