Ottomania - 9781848851061

`Ottomania synthesises an enormous amount of information--- historic, literary and artistic--- in a seemingly effortless way. There is never a dull moment. The book is a great achievement, the product of a lifetime's reading and research.'

`Romanticism had its roots in fantasy and fed on myth.' So Roderick Cavaliero introduces the European Romantic obsession with the Orient. Cavaliero draws on a lifetime's research in Romantic literature and introduces a rich cast of leading Romantic writers and travellers, including Beckford, Byron, Shelley, Walter Scott, Thomas Moore, Morier, Meredith, Thackeray and Disraeli, and a host of other Romantics, who were drawn to the Orient in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They luxuriate in its exotic sights, sounds, literature and, above all, in the prevailing mythology. Cavaliero analyses the Romantic vision where, as Byron writes, there are `virgins soft as the roses they twine', but lays bare an underlying vision of cruelty and oppression, and of societies based on domestic or prisoner slavery --- anathema to the nineteenth-century Romantic.

The overarching myth was that of the Ottoman Empire, a huge and exotic superpower, an empire to rival Rome, a major threat to Europe, with an invincible military record ruled by a Sultan with absolute, even feckless, power of life and death over his sujects who lived to `delight his senses'. But to the Romantics, fear of the absolute ruler was overlaid by frissions of oriental luxury. Thus the Ottoman Sultans were the heirs of the iconic Caliphate of Harun ar Rashid in the fabulous The Arabian Nights Entertainments. Coleridge's dream of the Orient in Kubla Khan was not of the barbaric grandeur of the global Mongol Empire but that of a `stately pleasure dome in Xandu' among incense-bearing trees and untroubled forests. Moore's Lalla Rookh was set in his visionary vale of Kashmir and is a love story in `a land of kingfishers and golden orioles' with the backdrop of the mighty Mughal Empire. Scott was obsessed by the chivalry of the Crusades on both sides and Disraeli was fascinated by the interplay of the Abrahamic faiths and the hopes of peace in the Holy Land. Dualism runs through Romantic writing even when European realpolitik and modern nationalism are involved --- as in the Greek revolt against Ottoman rule and the decline of Turkey as a great power. But above all for the Romantics the Orient remained mysterious and inviting.

Cavaliero's Ottomania will delight all readers interested in tales of the exotic Orient, and the literature of the Romantic movement --- a rich treasure-house of poets, novelists and travellers.