Death in Babylon : Alexander the Great & Iberian empire in the Muslim Orient

by: Barletta, V.

Though Alexander the Great lived more than seventeen centuries before the onset of Iberian expansion into Muslim Africa and Asia, he loomed large in the literature of late medieval and early modern Portugal and Spain. Exploring little-studied chronicles, chivalric romances, novels, travelogues, and crypto-Muslim texts, Vincent Barletta shows that the story of Alexander not only sowed the seeds of Iberian empire but foreshadowed the decline of Portuguese and Spanish influence in the centuries to come.

Death in Babylon depicts Alexander as a complex symbol of Western domination, immortality, dissolution, heroism, villainy, and death. But Barletta also shows that texts ostensibly celebrating the conqueror were haunted by failure. Examining literary and historical works in Aljamiado, Castilian, Catalan, Greek, Latin, and Portuguese, Death in Babylon develops a view of empire and modernity informed by the ethical metaphysics of French phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas. A novel contribution to the literature of empire building, Death in Babylon provides a frame for the deep mortal anxiety that has infused and given shape to the spread of imperial Europe from its very beginning.

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1. Death and the Other: An Introduction

Chapter 2. The Stinking Corpse: Alexander, the Greeks, and the Romans

Chapter 3. Oblivion: Iberian Empire in the Maghreb

Chapter 4. Immortality: The Promise of Asia

Chapter 5. Judgment: The Aljamiado Alexander

Chapter 6. Conclusions

Notes

References

Index

Death in Babylon : Alexander the Great & Iberian empire in the Muslim Orient

by: Barletta, V.

• ISBN-13: 9780226037363
• ISBN-03: 0226037363
• The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2010