Synopses & Reviews
Looking East explores early modern English attitudes toward the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century. To a nation just arriving on the international scene, the Ottoman Empire was at once the great enemy and scourge of Christendom, and at the same time the fabulously wealthy and magnificent court from which the sultan ruled over three continents with his great and powerful army. By taking the imaginative, literary and poetic writing about the Ottoman Turks and putting it alongside contemporary historical documents, the book shows that fascination with the Ottoman Empire shaped how the English thought about and represented their own place within the world as a nation with increasing imperial ambitions of its own.
Synopsis
Looking East examines how English encounters with the Ottoman Empire helped shape national identities and imperial ambitions. Engagingly written in an accessible style, this book demonstrates how the so-called 'conflict of civilizations' separating the Muslim East from the Christian West is a false and dangerous myth.
Synopsis
This book explores early modern English attitudes toward the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century.
About the Author
GERALD MACLEAN is Anniversary Professor at the University of York. He is the author of The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580-1720 and Reorienting the Renaissance: Cultural Exchanges with the East.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations * Preface * Introduction: Islam, the Ottomans and Early Modern England * PART 1: BEGINNINGS * The English Encounter the Ottoman World * The English Abroad: Travellers, Traders, Captives and Colonists in the Ottoman Mediterranean * Performing East and Captive Agency * PART 2: WRITING THE OTTOMAN WORLD On Turning Turk, or Trying to: National Identity in Robert Daborne's
A Christian Turn'd Turke * The Sultans Beasts: Encountering Ottoman Fauna * The Making of the British Imperial Subject * PART 3: SOME LITERARY IMPACTS * Learn of a Turk: Restoration Culture and the Ottoman Empire * A View from the West: Young American Writing about the Maghrib * A View from the East: Don Juan in England