Home
The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism
Barnes and Noble
The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism
Current price: $230.00
Barnes and Noble
The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism
Current price: $230.00
Size: OS
Loading Inventory...
*Product information may vary - to confirm product availability, pricing, shipping and return information please contact Barnes and Noble
The dream of building Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land has long been a quintessential part of English identity and culture: but how did this vision shape the Victorian encounter with the
Jerusalem in the Middle East?
offers a new cultural history of the English fascination with Palestine in the long nineteenth century, from Napoleon's failed Mediterranean campaign of 1799, which marked a new era in the British involvement in the land, to Allenby's conquest of Jerusalem in 1917. Bar-Yosef argues that the Protestant tradition of internalizing Biblical vocabulary"Promised Land," "Chosen People," "Jerusalem"and applying it to different, often contesting, visions of England and Englishness evoked a unique sense of ambivalence towards the imperial desire to possess the Holy Land. Popular religious culture, in other words, was crucial to the construction of the orientalist discourse: so crucial, in fact, that metaphorical appropriations of the "Holy Land" played a much more dominant role in the English cultural imagination than the actual Holy Land itself.
As it traces the diversity of "Holy Lands" in the Victorian cultural landscapeliteral and metaphorical, secular and sacred, radical and patriotic, visual and textualthis study joins the ongoing debate about the dissemination of imperial ideology. Drawing on a wide array of sources, from Sunday-school textbooks and popular exhibitions to penny magazines and soldiers' diaries, the book demonstrates how the orientalist discourse functionsor, to be more precise, malfunctionsin those popular cultural spheres that are so markedly absent from Edward Said's work: it is only by exploring sources that go beyond the highbrow, the academic, or the official, that we can begin to grasp the limited currency of the orientalist discourse in the metropolitan center, and the different meanings it could hold for different social groups. As such,
provides a significant contribution to both postcolonial studies and English social history.