1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910807067703321

Autore

Teo Hsu-Ming <1970->

Titolo

Desert passions [[electronic resource] ] : Orientalism and romance novels / / by Hsu-Ming Teo

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Austin, : University of Texas Press, c2012

ISBN

0-292-73939-7

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (355 p.)

Disciplina

809/.933585

Soggetti

Orientalism in literature

Love stories - History and criticism

Women in literature

East and West in literature

Orient In literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Loving the Orient : the romantic East and European literature -- The rise of the desert romance novel -- E. M. Hull's The Sheik -- The spectacular East : romantic Orientalism in America -- The Orientalist historical romance novel -- The contemporary sheik romance novel : the historical background -- Harems, houris, heroines, and heroes -- From tourism to terrorism -- Reader responses to the modern Orientalist romance novel.

Sommario/riassunto

The Sheik—E. M. Hull’s best-selling novel that became a wildly popular film starring Rudolph Valentino—kindled “sheik fever” across the Western world in the 1920s. A craze for all things romantically “Oriental” swept through fashion, film, and literature, spawning imitations and parodies without number. While that fervor has largely subsided, tales of passion between Western women and Arab men continue to enthrall readers of today’s mass-market romance novels. In this groundbreaking cultural history, Hsu-Ming Teo traces the literary lineage of these desert romances and historical bodice rippers from the twelfth to the twenty-first century and explores the gendered cultural and political purposes that they have served at various historical moments. Drawing on “high” literature, erotica, and popular romance



fiction and films, Teo examines the changing meanings of Orientalist tropes such as crusades and conversion, abduction by Barbary pirates, sexual slavery, the fear of renegades, the Oriental despot and his harem, the figure of the powerful Western concubine, and fantasies of escape from the harem. She analyzes the impact of imperialism, decolonization, sexual liberation, feminism, and American involvement in the Middle East on women’s Orientalist fiction. Teo suggests that the rise of female-authored romance novels dramatically transformed the nature of Orientalism because it feminized the discourse; made white women central as producers, consumers, and imagined actors; and revised, reversed, or collapsed the binaries inherent in traditional analyses of Orientalism.