Description
Book SynopsisA corrective addendum to Edward Said's Orientalism, this book examines how sympathetic representations of Islam contributed significantly to Protestant Britain's national and imperial identity in the eighteenth century.
Taking a historical view, Humberto Garcia combines a rereading of eighteenth-century and Romantic-era British literature with original research on Anglo-Islamic relations. He finds that far from being considered foreign by the era's thinkers, Islamic republicanism played a defining role in Radical Enlightenment debates, most significantly during the Glorious Revolution, French Revolution, and other moments of acute constitutional crisis, as well as in national and political debates about England and its overseas empire. Garcia shows that writers such as Edmund Burke, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Percy and Mary Shelley not only were influenced by international events in the Muslim world but also saw in that world
Trade Review
"A tour de force in substance and argument, Humberto Garcia's signal study uncovers a surprisingly coeval narrative with Enlightenment ideals and demonstrates in painstaking detail the multifarious receptions and assimilations of Islam into English constitutional and nationalist discourse. This book will make an impressive difference to the field of post-colonial inquiry." (Rajani Sudan, author of Fair Exotics: Xenophobic Subjects in English Literature, 1720-1850)"
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Rethinking Islam in the Eighteenth Century
1. A True Protestant Mahometan: Henry Stubbe, Ottoman Hungary, and the Siege of Vienna
2. Letters from a Female Deist: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Muslim Women, and Freethinking Feminism
3. In Defense of the Ancient Mughal Constitution: Edmund Burke, India, and the Warren Hastings Trial
4. Ali Bonaparte in Hermetic Egypt: The Colonial Politics of Walter Savage Landor's Gebir
5. The Flight and Return of Mohammed: Plotting Samuel Taylor Coleridge's and Robert Southey's Unitarian Epic
6. A Last Woman's Eschatology: The Avenging Turks in Mary Shelley's The Last Man
Epilogue: Postcolonial Reflections
Appendix A: Outline of "MOHAMMED"
Appendix B: Southey's Sketch of "Mohammed"
Notes
Works Cited
Index
