Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Readings of the Medieval Orient : Other Encounters

Travel narratives and historical works shaped the perception of Muslims and the East in the Victorian and post-Victorian periods. Analyzing the discourses on Muslims which originated in the European Middle Ages, the first part of the book discusses the troubled legacy of the encounters between the East and the West and locates the nineteenth-century texts concerning the Saracens and their lands in the liminal space between history and fiction.

Drawing on the nineteenth-century models, the second part of the book looks at fictional and non-fictional works of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century which re-established the "Oriental obsession," stimulating dread and resentment, and even more strongly setting the Civilized West against the Barbaric East. Here medieval metaphorical enemies of Mankind – the World, the Flesh and the Devil – reappear in different contexts: the world of immigration, of white women desiring Muslim men, and the present-day "freedom fighters."

"This is an ambitious, engaged and erudite incursion into orientalism and related matters. It will add to critical debate in various fields, ranging from historiography to literary criticism." (Dr. Tabish Khair, novelist, associate professor, Aarhus University)

"This study contributes to research on medievalism in a very original manner: it links the distant past (medieval) with the not-so-distant Orientalism (the nineteenth and early twentieth-century one) and then with present-day culture. Liliana Sikorska writes her book with the intention of re-historicizing the Occident and inscribes her study into the recent debates on political medievalism. Her erudite analysis, complemented with copious references, throws some new light on postmedieval medievalisms that are rarely discussed in the study of medievalism." (Professor Anna Czarnowus, University of Silesia)