Desert passions : Orientalism and romance novels / by Hsu-Ming Teo.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Teo, Hsu-Ming, 1970-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Orientalism in literature.

Romance fiction--History and criticism.

Romance fiction.

Women in literature.

East and West in literature.

Orient--In literature.

Orient.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (355 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Austin : University of Texas Press, c2012.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

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.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780292739390

0292739397

OCLC:

813844932