Elite and Popular Orientalisms

Le résumé fourni par la source

This essay emphasises the continuity across high and low cultural forms of a generic and non-referential Orientalism, comprising ‘old’ but adaptable stories (the Arabian Nights’ tales) and tropes (Oriental despotism). Addressing the interface of literary and visual representation, it begins by looking at popular theatre, where in the case of Lewis’s Timour the Tartar, supplementary spectacle compromised the play’s critical reputation but ensured publicity and commercial success. It notes that more prestigious works by Beckford and Byron remained affiliated with popular drama, even as their authors distanced themselves from the crowd, and it considers the period’s best-known example of elite Orientalist performance, the Brighton Royal Pavilion. Though caricatured as frivolous, this ‘Regency Orientalism’ was sympathetically repackaged in Moore’s Lalla Rookh, read by some as successfully pastiching an ‘authentic’ magnificence that recuperated the social exclusivity of elite Orientalism. The essay finally discusses ‘Cockney’ writers including Hunt and Lamb who responded to Regency Orientalism and playfully disrupted the elite/popular. With reference to the idea of spectatorial pleasure that runs throughout, it concludes by addressing the much-debated question of the nature of Britons’ lived relation to empire in this period.

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