It is with great pleasure we announce today the publication of Orientalism and the Recreation of the Islamicate Canon with Oxford University Press by our Senior Research Fellow Professor Claire Gallien.
Reconfiguring and Appropriating Arabic, Persian, and Indic Literary Traditions in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain investigates the reconfigurations of literary traditions coming from Islamicate regions of the world by British orientalists. Claire Gallien explores the logics of orientalist selection, reconfiguration, and appropriation of Islamicate literary canons, and focuses on the period going from the endowment of the first chairs in Arabic at Cambridge and Oxford in 1632 and 1636 respectively to the establishment of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta in 1784, presided by Sir William Jones until 1794. Contrary to the Saidian premise of an invention of the East by the West, Gallien argues that orientalists did not invent a canon but they transferred and translated texts and authors, which/who were already recognised as canonical across Islamicate literary cultures. Given the above, the question that preoccupies this book is what happens to the canon when partially re-created and re-purposed for European readers.
Organised in three main parts, this book analyses first the constitution of collections of Arabic, Persian, and Indic manuscripts and their cataloguing in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The second part investigates the variety of linguistic and literary partitioning and assemblage proposed by orientalists and discusses how their classical literary formation underpinned theories and practices of imitation, translation, and writing. The third part examines the editing and translating of Arabic, Persian, and Indic literatures in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England as well as in British colonial India, and in particular the function of specimens and anthologies in the constitution of a corpus of Eastern literatures in English.
Commenting on the release of her newest publication, Professor Claire Gallien said:
“This book has been seven years in the making and is the result of many hundreds of hours spent rummaging through the Oriental archives at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. This project was made possible through the Bahari Visiting Fellowship award, which supports research using the Bodleian’s Persian and Islamic Collections, for which I remain grateful.”
You can now purchase this book here – use promotion code AUFLY30 at checkout to save 30%.