U.S. orientalisms: race, nation, and gender in literature, 1790-1890

Abstract

U.S. Orientalisms is the first extensive and politicized study of nineteenth-century American discourses that helped build an idea of nationhood with control over three Orients: the Barbary Orient; the Orient of Egypt; and the Orient of India. The book begins with an examination of the literature of the Barbary Orient generated by the U.S.-Algerian conflict in the late eighteenth century in the works of such writers as Royall Tyler, Susanna Rowson, and Washington Irving. It then moves on to the Near East Orientalist literature of the nineteenth century in light of Egyptology, theories of race, and the growth of missionary fervor in writers such as John DeForest, Maria Susanna Cummins, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and Harriet Prescott Spofford. Finally, Schueller considers the Indic Orientalism of the period in the context of Indology, British colonialism, and the push for Asian trade in the United States, focusing particularly on Emerson and Whitman. U.S. Orientalisms demonstrates how these writers strove to create an Orientalism premised on the idea of civilization and empire moving west, from Asia, through Europe, and culminating in the New World.

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