The portrayal of the Orient in romantic poetry : Lord Byron’s ‘The giaour: a fragment of a Turkish tale’ and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The rime of the ancient mariner’

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to analyse the way in which the Orient is portrayed and represented in Romantic poetry, with particular attention to Lord Byron’s The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale and Samuel T. Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The introduction gives a brief overview of what attracted Romantic poets to the exotic East, while also introducing the two main frameworks that will be used to study and interpret the chosen poems. The first chapter delves into the first framework, which is used to analyse Romantic Orientalism as a product of the political context in which the poets wrote, arguing that the Orient was exploited for literary profit and that the West’s imperial tendencies are evident in Romantics’ portrayal of the Orient. The second chapter then argues for an alternate perspective to that proposed by Edward Said and Nigel Leask in the first chapter, and looks at Romantic Orientalism not as politically driven but as a purely Romantic endeavour that is interested in the East’s mystery and exoticism for its own sake, and that uses the Orient as inspiration for imaginative poetry. The third and fourth chapters focus on Lord Bryon’s The Giaour and Samuel T. Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner respectively, and examine how the poets represent the Orient by using the two perspectives outlined in the first two chapters. This dissertation finally concludes with a reiteration about the East’s allure and the fascination that it instilled in the Romantics.