| This dissertation examines how the idea of an "Oriental style" developed in Britain during the long eighteenth century. The first chapter, "The Oriental Style in Biblical Apologetics," argues that the term was first used by Robert Boyle, Richard Blackmore, and other apologists to defend the literary value of the Hebrew Bible against criticisms that it didn't measure up to neo-Classical and Classical poetics. Chapter Two, "Stylizing the Qur'an as Eastern Eloquence," describes how the characteristics of the Oriental Style initially enabled a greater appreciation of the Qur'an's eloquence but would, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, be used to fault Muslims for favoring rhetoric over reason. Chapter Three, "The 'Discovery' of Arabic Poetry," highlights the writings of Oxford's Edward Pococke, who introduced Arabic poetry to England's shores through his detailed account of pre-Islamic poetics. His extremely erudite and extensive annotations to the "Lâmiyat al-'Ajam," the first Arabic qasidah, or polythematic ode, published in Europe (along with the poem's subsequent translations into English) offer an early example of comparative poetics. Chapter Four, "Oriental Poetry and Poetics in Eighteenth-Century British Culture," explores the expansion of `Oriental Style' beyond Biblical apologetics. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu uses the term to explicate and (misintrept) Ottoman verses; William Collins's "Persian Eclogues" (1742) occasions a debate over representing and imitating the Orient, while Hugh Blair and Thomas Warton show the tension underlying theoretical notions of primitivist and Eastern aesthetics. The last chapter, "Sir William Jones and Bedouin Primitivism," argues that in presenting Arabic poetry as expressive of the passionate, unstudied, and timeless nomadic East, the period's foremost champion of Asian literature he obscured what he knew about the highly formal and cosmopolitan tradition of Islamicate poetry to accommodate popular notions of the Oriental style. |
