Late Victorian Orientalism Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 FitzGerald’s timelines
- Chapter 2 Empires and scapegoats: The Pre-Raphaelites in the Near East
- Chapter 3 Aja’ib, mutalibun and hur al-ayn: Rossetti, Morris, Swinburne and the Arabian Nights
- Chapter 4 The use of contradictions in John La Farge’s prismatic syncretism
- Chapter 5 ‘Strange webs with Eastern merchants’: The Orient of aesthetic poetry
- Chapter 6 Rudyard Kipling, The Mark of the Beast and the elusive monkey
- Chapter 7 Borrowed verses: Code and representation within the first travelogue of the city of Hong Kong, 1841–42
- Chapter 8 Newby and Thesiger: Humour and lament in the Hindu Kush
- Chapter 9 The exoticism of Téchiné’s Les Soeurs Brontë: The dream of an impossible elsewhere
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 9 - The exoticism of Téchiné’s Les Soeurs Brontë: The dream of an impossible elsewhere
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 FitzGerald’s timelines
- Chapter 2 Empires and scapegoats: The Pre-Raphaelites in the Near East
- Chapter 3 Aja’ib, mutalibun and hur al-ayn: Rossetti, Morris, Swinburne and the Arabian Nights
- Chapter 4 The use of contradictions in John La Farge’s prismatic syncretism
- Chapter 5 ‘Strange webs with Eastern merchants’: The Orient of aesthetic poetry
- Chapter 6 Rudyard Kipling, The Mark of the Beast and the elusive monkey
- Chapter 7 Borrowed verses: Code and representation within the first travelogue of the city of Hong Kong, 1841–42
- Chapter 8 Newby and Thesiger: Humour and lament in the Hindu Kush
- Chapter 9 The exoticism of Téchiné’s Les Soeurs Brontë: The dream of an impossible elsewhere
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The thrust towards the ‘elsewhere’, crossing the entire filmography of André Téchiné as a manifest narrative element – indispensable to the evolution […] of the relationships between the characters – and as a theoretical one […] constantly unfolds the French director's cinema to travelling, to a progressive mobility, to a dialogue between the images […] which meet and lose each other again on an apolid horizon line, to be walked through with one's eyes and body. On the run they are, the characters and the pictures of Téchiné’s, or unable to dwell therein, in a house, at home, be this enshrined in the body of a metropolis, in a provincial city, or in the countryside, in the mountains overlooking the sea. Places and memories to stay away from, towards new geographies, near and distant destinations, and never definitive, witnesses of the restlessness of a living, and of a filming of that living as displaced subjects […] The ‘elsewhere’, thus, in Téchiné, takes on a multitude of meanings, layered on many levels, it is political, social, intimate, always conflicting, without it his characters, and his films themselves, could not exist, or would exist with a similar nervous tension, a similar moral and aesthetical rigour.
Orientalism is primarily the study of Near and Far Eastern societies, languages and cultures by Western scholars. This interest in the East was fostered by the great changes of the nineteenth century, such as the colonial expansion, the expedition of Bonaparte, the independence of Greece, the control of the routes to India and, not least, the fateful and the eternal Question of the East (Question d’Orient). Although its roots plunge in earlier times, Orientalism is mainly manifested in painting and literature and gives voice not only to a historical and cultural evolution, but also to the exceptional development of transport, increasingly safer and convenient. The journey to the East therefore drives artists, writers and scholars to explore distant landscapes and worlds, hitherto unknown or simply dreamed of. In the literature of the nineteenth century, Orientalism, as a result, affirms itself as a genre of its own, bespeaking of a romantic aesthetic that enhances a distant place, often only envisioned.
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- Late Victorian OrientalismRepresentations of the East in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Art and Culture from the Pre-Raphaelites to John La Farge, pp. 183 - 206Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2020