Desert Passions : : Orientalism and Romance Novels / / Hsu-Ming Teo.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter University of Texas Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Teo, Hsu-Ming,
• Place / Publishing House: Austin : : University of Texas Press, , [2021]; ©2012
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (352 p.)

The Sheik—E. M. Hull’s best-selling novel that became a wildly popular film starring Rudolph Valentino—kindled “sheik fever” across the Western world in the 1920s. A craze for all things romantically “Oriental” swept through fashion, film, and literature, spawning imitations and parodies without number. While that fervor has largely subsided, tales of passion between Western women and Arab men continue to enthrall readers of today’s mass-market romance novels. In this groundbreaking cultural history, Hsu-Ming Teo traces the literary lineage of these desert romances and historical bodice rippers from the twelfth to the twenty-first century and explores the gendered cultural and political purposes that they have served at various historical moments. Drawing on “high” literature, erotica, and popular romance fiction and films, Teo examines the changing meanings of Orientalist tropes such as crusades and conversion, abduction by Barbary pirates, sexual slavery, the fear of renegades, the Oriental despot and his harem, the figure of the powerful Western concubine, and fantasies of escape from the harem. She analyzes the impact of imperialism, decolonization, sexual liberation, feminism, and American involvement in the Middle East on women’s Orientalist fiction. Teo suggests that the rise of female-authored romance novels dramatically transformed the nature of Orientalism because it feminized the discourse; made white women central as producers, consumers, and imagined actors; and revised, reversed, or collapsed the binaries inherent in traditional analyses of Orientalism.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- One. Loving the Orient: The Romantic East and European Literature -- Two The Rise of the Desert Romance Novel -- Three E. M. Hull’s The Sheik -- Four The Spectacular East: Romantic Orientalism in America -- Five The Orientalist Historical Romance Novel -- Six The Contemporary Sheik Romance Novel: The Historical Background -- Seven Harems, Heroines, and Heroes -- Eight From Tourism to Terrorism -- Nine Reader Responses to the Modern Orientalist Romance Novel -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index