Homer's Turk : How Classics Shaped Ideas of the East

by: Toner, J.

Price: 42,00 EURO

1 copy in stock

Homer's Turk : how classics shaped ideas of the East
 

Author:J. P. Toner

Summary:A seventeenth-century English traveler to the Eastern Mediterranean would have faced a problem in writing about this unfamiliar place: how to describe its inhabitants in a way his countrymen would understand? In an age when a European education meant mastering the Classical literature of Greece and Rome, he would naturally turn to touchstones like the Iliad to explain the exotic customs of Ottoman lands. His Turk would have been Homer's Turk. An account of epic sweep, spanning the Crusades, the Indian Raj, and the postwar decline of the British Empire, Homer's Turk illuminates how English writers of all eras have relied on the Classics to help them understand the world once called "the Orient." Ancient Greek and Roman authors, Jerry Toner shows, served as a conceptual frame of reference over long periods in which trade, religious missions, and imperial interests shaped English encounters with the East. Rivaling the Bible as a widespread, flexible vehicle of Western thought, the Classics provided a ready model for portrayal and understanding of the Oriental Other. Such image-making, Toner argues, persists today in some of the ways the West frames its relationship with the Islamic world and the rising powers of India and China. Discussing examples that range from Jacobean travelogues to Hollywood blockbusters, Homer's Turk proves that there is no permanent version of either the ancient past or the East in English writing--the two have been continually reinvented alongside each other

x, 306 pages ; 22 cm

Contents:
pt. I. Contexts. Classicizing orientalisms ; The uses of classics ; Classics and medieval images of islam
pt. II. Texts. Traders and travelers ; Gibbon's islam ; The Roman raj ; Empires ancient and modern ; Colonial adventures
pt. III. Afterwords. Screen classics ; American Roman nova

Subjects:
Antike
Asia Orient
Classical literature Influence
Early works
Great Britain
Großbritannien
Historiography
Historiography Great Britain History
History
Islambild
Literatur
Littérature ancienne Influence
Orient Description and travel Early works to 1800
Orient Descriptions et voyages Ouvrages avant 1800
Orient Historiographie
Orient Historiography
Orient Historiography History
Orientalism
Orientalism Great Britain History
Orientalisme Grande-Bretagne Histoire
Orientbild
Rezeption
Travel
Travel writing
Travel writing Great Britain History
Voyage Art d'écrire Grande-Bretagne Histoire

Homer's Turk : How Classics Shaped Ideas of the East

by: Toner, J.

• ISBN-13: 9780674073142 / 978-0-674-07314-2
• ISBN-03: 0674073142 / 0-674-07314-2
• Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2013

Price: 42,00 EURO

1 copy in stock