Representing the East in Medieval and Early Modern Literature - Detailseite

This seminar explores 14th- to early 17th-century literary depictions of the (mostly Islamic) East, a cultural and imaginative space which comprised regions from the Eastern Mediterranean and Africa to East Asia and held great fascination for medieval and early modern authors, readers and theatre audiences. Starting with the analysis of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville and of depictions of violent Christian-Islamic conflicts in 14^th-century metrical romance, we will discuss in how far medieval and early modern English representations of the East and especially of Muslims and Islamic cultures emphasized cultural division or the commensurability of Islam and Christianity. Furthermore, we will examine if medieval and early modern literary representations of Christian-Islamic and Anglo-Ottoman conflicts and relations were more ambiguous and fluid than in the period of Orientalism. Medieval romance and early modern drama contain stereotypical images and characters that still influence Western perspectives on the East (especially Islam), e. g. the cruel, aggressive or voluptuous male ‘Saracen’/ ‘Turk’ or the seductive (and in the case of early modern drama strikingly powerful) woman of the East. In this seminar, we will discuss whether the selected literary texts can be said to belong to a period ‘before Orientalism’ (as some scholars have suggested), not merely in historical but also in cultural and aesthetic terms. Furthermore, we will examine how this question is approached by film and stage directors in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

We will analyse the following texts:

Richard Coer de Lyon (early 14^th century)

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (? 1357-1371)

Christopher Marlowe: Tamburlaine the Great I/II (1578/1588)

William Shakespeare: Othello (1604)

William Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra (1607)

The following film and stage productions will be discussed in class:

Othello (1995), dir. Oliver Parker (DVD)

Othello (2015), dir. Iqbal Khan (DVD)

Antony and Cleopatra (2018), dir. Iqbal Khan (DVD)

Please purchase or borrow copies of Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s plays (the Arden edition is recommended for Othello and Antony and Cleopatra and the New Mermaids edition for Tamburlaine I/II). Copies of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville and of Richard Coer de Lyon, the DVDs and all secondary literature for the course will be provided at the beginning of the term.