Husain, Imdad

2019-02-15T14:30:06Z

2019-02-15T14:30:06Z

1934

The influence of the Orient on English poets of the Romantic Revival, though perhaps not so deep and important, as on their German and French contemporaries, has been found significant enough to merit a study. Miss M.P. Conant of Columbia University, in her book The Oriental Tale in En 'land in the 18th Century, (1908) . catalogued a vast number of Oriental and pseudo-Oriental tales, inspired mostly by the introduction from France of the Arabian Nights & Oriental tales. But her book treats only the eighteenth century writers of prose tales - the only verse -tale of consequence. coning under her survey being Landor's Gebir. The discovery of the treasures of Oriental literature by Sir William Jones and other Oriental scholars in the latter part of the 18th century and the enthusiasm with which Oriental literature began to be studied both in England and on the continent, were, however, matters of greater and more far-reaching importance than the introduction of the ,Arabian rights. Books of travel, history and scholarship about the Orient rapidly multiplied, from which the latter writers like Coleridge, Southey, Moore, Shelley, and others, extracted material for poetry. In our first chapter we have given a short sketch of Oriental scholarship.and travel, enumerating some of the more important books that supplied these poets with their bookish notions of the Orient, and in the subsequent chapters, we have treated one by one all those poets who wrote on Oriental themes; FitzGerald's Rubaiyát being the culmination and the finest product of that Orientalism, whose inaugurators were the late eighteenth century Oriental scholars, and some of the poets of the Romantic Revival.

The concluding chapter contains some general remarks on the tendencies and results of the period.

http://hdl.handle.net/1842/34710

The University of Edinburgh

Annexe Thesis Digitisation Project 2019 Block 22

The Oriental elements in English poetry (1784-1859)

Thesis or Dissertation

Doctoral

PhD Doctor of Philosophy