In the 18th century the idea of the landscape garden, which had originated in England, spread all over Europe. The geometry of the Baroque park was abandoned in favour of a 'natural' design. At the same time the garden became "The land of illusion": Chinese pagodas, Egyptian tombs, and Turkish mosques, along with Gothic stables and Greek and Roman temples, formed a miniature world in which distance mingled with the past. The keen interest in a fairy-tale China, which was manifested not only in the gardens but also in the chinoiseries of the Rococo, abated in the 19th century. The increasing expansion of the European colonial powers was reflected in new exotic fashions. While in England it was primarily the conquest of the Indian subcontinent that captured the imagination, for France the occupation of Algiers triggered an Orient-inspired fashion that spread from Paris to encompass the entire Continent, and found its expression in paintings, novels, operas, and buildings. This 'Orient', which could not be clearly defined geographically, was characterised by Islamic culture: It extended around the Mediterranean Sea from Constantinople to Granada. There, it was the Alhambra that fascinated writers and architects. The Islamic styles seemed especially appropriate for "buildings of a secular and cheerful character". In contrast to ancient Egyptian building forms, which, being severe and monumental, were preferably used for cemetery buildings, prisons or libraries, they promised earthly sensuous pleasures. The promise of happiness associated with an Orient staged by architectural means was intended to guarantee the commercial success of coffee houses and music halls, amusement parks, and steam baths. But even extravagant summer residences and middle-class villas were often built in faux-Oriental styles: In Brighton, the Prince Regent George (George IV after 1820) built himself an Indian palace; in Bad Cannstatt near Stuttgart, a 'Moorish' refuge was erected for Württemberg's King Wilhelm I; and the French town of Tourcoing was the site of the Palais du Congo, a bombastic villa in the Indian Moghul style that belonged to a wealthy perfume and soap manufacturer.

A leading critic and historian of nineteenth-century art and society explores in nine essays the interaction of art, society, ideas, and politics.

A groundbreaking critique of the West's historical, cultural, and political perceptions of the East that is—three decades after its first publication—one of the most important books written about our divided world. "Intellectual history on a high order ... and very exciting." —The New York Times In this wide-ranging, intellectually vigorous study, Said traces the origins of "orientalism" to the centuries-long period during which Europe dominated the Middle and Near East and, from its position of power, defined "the orient" simply as "other than" the occident. This entrenched view continues to dominate western ideas and, because it does not allow the East to represent itself, prevents true understanding.

The nineteenth century is central to contemporary discussions of visual culture. This reader brings together key writings on the period, exploring such topics as photographs, exhibitions and advertising.

A fascinating analysis of how Jews fit into scholarly debates about Orientalism.

Srinivas Aravamudan here reveals how Oriental tales, pseudo-ethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political satires took Europe by storm during the eighteenth century. Naming this body of fiction Enlightenment Orientalism, he poses a range of urgent questions that uncovers the interdependence of Oriental tales and domestic fiction, thereby challenging standard scholarly narratives about the rise of the novel. More than mere exoticism, Oriental tales fascinated ordinary readers as well as intellectuals, taking the fancy of philosophers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot in France, and writers such as Defoe, Swift, and Goldsmith in Britain. Aravamudan shows that Enlightenment Orientalism was a significant movement that criticized irrational European practices even while sympathetically bridging differences among civilizations. A sophisticated reinterpretation of the history of the novel, Enlightenment Orientalism is sure to be welcomed as a landmark work in eighteenth-century studies.

The place of the Middle East in European heterosexual fantasy is well documented in the works of Edward Said and others, yet few have considered the male Anglo-European (and, later, American) writers, artists, travelers, and thinkers compelled to represent what, to their eyes, seemed to be an abundance of erotic relations between men in the Islamicate world. Whether feared or desired, the mere possibility of sexual contact with or between men in the Middle East has covertly underwritten much of the appeal and practice of the enterprise of Orientalism, frequently repeating yet just as often upending its assumed meanings. Traces of this undertow abound in European and Middle Eastern fiction, diaries, travel literature, erotica, ethnography, painting, photography, film, and digital media. Joseph Allen Boone explores these vast representations, linking European art to Middle Eastern sources largely unfamiliar to Western audiences and, in some cases, reproduced in this volume for the first time.

Offering a fresh perspective on the influence of the American southwest--and particularly West Texas--on the New York art world of the 1950s, Three Women Artists: Expanding Abstract Expressionism in the American West aims to establish the significance of itinerant teaching and western travel as a strategic choice for women artists associated with traditional centers of artistic authority and population in the eastern United States. The book is focused on three artists: Elaine de Kooning, Jeanne Reynal, and Louise Nevelson. In their travels to and work in the High Plains, they were inspired to innovate their abstract styles and introduce new critical dialogues through their work. These women traveled west for the same reason artists often travel to new places: they found paid work, markets, patrons, and friends. This Middle American context offers us a "decentered" modernism--demanding that we look beyond our received truths about Abstract Expressionism. Authors Amy Von Lintel and Bonnie Roos demonstrate that these women's New York avant-garde, abstract styles were attractive to Panhandle-area ranchers, bankers, and aspiring art students. Perhaps as importantly, they show that these artists' aesthetics evolved in light of their regional experiences. Offering their work as a supplement and corrective to the frameworks of patriarchal, East Coast ethnocentrism, Von Lintel and Roos make the case for Texas as influential in the national art scene of the latter half of the twentieth century.

To what extent did white European women contribute to the imperial cultures of the second half of the nineteenth century?

In the decades following the French Revolution, four artists - Girodet, Gros, Gericault, and Delacroix - painted works in their Parisian studios that vividly expressed violent events in faraway, colonial lands. This book examines six of these paintings and argues that their disturbing, erotic depictions of slavery, revolt, plague, decapitation, cannibalism, massacre, and abduction chart the history of France's empire and colonial politics. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby shows that these paintings about occurrences in the West Indies, Syria, Egypt, Senegal, and Ottoman Empire Greece are preoccupied not with mastery and control but with loss, degradation, and failure, and she explains how such representations of crises in the colonies were able to answer the artists' longings as well as the needs of the government and the opposition parties at home. Empire made painters devoted to the representation of liberty and the new French nation confront liberty's antithesis: slavery. It also forced them to contend with cultural and racial difference. Young male artists responded, says Grigsby, by translating distant crises into images of challenges to the self, making history painting the site where geographic extremities and bodily extremities articulated one another.