Orientalism The Romantic Era Of British Literature And...

Set I 1. Orientalism played a huge role in the Romanticism movement. Romantic orientalism expands the key points of the romantic era of British literature and meshes it with the exotic nature or the oriental fantasy of the east. The romantic period in Britain was recognized as a time of global travel and exploration, accession of colonies all over the world, and development of imperialist ideologies that rationalized the British takeover of distant territories. Many of the poets of the nineteenth century looked to orientalism for inspiration. Oriental tales featured exotic settings, supernatural happenings, extravagant events, characters, behavior, emotion, and speech. Romanticism and Orientalism offer escape from everyday reality but they also force confrontation with the alien (the non-human as other) and the foreign (the other as nonhuman). Pleasurable terror and terrifying exoticism are kindred experiences, with reality and strangeness at the root of both. The oriental cannot be powerfu l in its regular form. The romantics found the orient fascinating outside of its regular form. The fascination is with the brokenness of the orient. The orient is always old, broken and the past. Romanticism highlights the strong rebellion against social conventions seen in orientalism. The Romantic era was during the rise and persistent reign of the British monarchy. Orientalism focused on the idea of fading empires, which was very interesting to the romantics. As stated in class a