Sir William Jones (1746-1794) is best known for his famous Third Discourse of 1786 in which he proposed that Sanskrit's affinity to Greek and Latin could be explained by positing a common, earlier source, one known today as Indo-European. This brilliant thesis laid the groundwork for modern comparative linguistics. Jones' interests and achievements, however, ranged far beyond language. He studied and made contributions to anthropology, archaeology, astronomy, botany, history, law, literature, music, physiology, politics, and religion. He served as a Supreme Court justice in India and founded the Asiatic Society, which stimulated world-wide interest in India and the Orient. He was friends with many of the leading intellectuals of his day and corresponded with Benjamin Franklin in America and with Burke, Gibbon, Johnson, Percy and Reynolds in Britain. In his short life he mastered so many languages that he was regarded even in his own time as a phenomenon, and so he was. Garland Cannon, editor of the much acclaimed The Letters of Sir William Jones, has written a new and definitive biography of this fascinating man, who in his life and works teaches us that the path to understanding and appreciating the art and literature of a great culture very different from our own is through devoted study, a tolerant spirit, and an unquenchably curious mind.

Sir William Jones (1746-1794) is best known for his famous Third Discourse of 1786 in which he proposed that Sanskrit's affinity to Greek and Latin could be explained by positing a common, earlier source, one known today as Indo-European. This brilliant thesis laid the groundwork for modern comparative linguistics. Jones' interests and achievements, however, ranged far beyond language. He studied and made contributions to anthropology, archaeology, astronomy, botany, history, law, literature, music, physiology, politics, and religion. He served as a Supreme Court justice in India and founded the Asiatic Society, which stimulated world-wide interest in India and the Orient. He was friends with many of the leading intellectuals of his day and corresponded with Benjamin Franklin in America and with Burke, Gibbon, Johnson, Percy and Reynolds in Britain. In his short life he mastered so many languages that he was regarded even in his own time as a phenomenon, and so he was. Garland Cannon, editor of the much acclaimed The Letters of Sir William Jones, has written a new and definitive biography of this fascinating man, who in his life and works teaches us that the path to understanding and appreciating the art and literature of a great culture very different from our own is through devoted study, a tolerant spirit, and an unquenchably curious mind.

The first two essays describe Sir William Jones, a brilliant and engaged man of letters who became an authority on the languages, laws, and literatures of many of the major world civilizations. The next four essays describe Jones's contributions to linguistics, jurisprudence, history, natural science, and other fields. The last two essays address Jones's impact in German- speaking areas and his place in the history of British Orientalism. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Sir William Jones (1746-94) was the foremost Orientalist of his generation and one of the greatest intellectual navigators of all time. He re-drew the map of European thought. 'Orientalist' Jones was an extraordinary man and an intensely colourful figure. At the age of twenty-six, Jones was elected to Dr Johnson's Literary Club, on terms of intimacy with the metropolitan luminaries of the day. The names of his friends in Britain and India present a roll-call of late eighteenth-century glitterati: Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Priestley, Edmund Burke, Warren Hastings, Johannes Zoffany, Edward Gibbon, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Charles James Fox, William Pitt, and David Garrick. In Bengal his Sanskrit researches marked the beginning of Indo-European comparative grammar, and modern comparative-historical linguistics, of Indology, and the disciplines of comparative literature, philology, mythology, and law. He did more than any other writer to destroy Eurocentric prejudice, reshaping Western perceptions of India and the Orient. His commitment to the translation of culture, a multiculturalism fascinated as much by similitude as difference, profoundly influenced European and British Romanticism, offering the West disconcerting new relationships and disorienting orientations. Jones's translation of the Hindu myth of Sakuntala (1789) led to an Oriental renaissance in the West and cultural revolution in India. Remembered with great affection throughout the subcontinent as a man who facilitated India's cultural assimilation into the modern world, Jones helped to build India's future on the immensity, sophistication, and pluralism of its past. Michael J. Franklin's extensive archival research reveals new insights into this radical intellectual: a figure characterized by Goethe as 'a far-seeing man, he seeks to connect the unknown to the known', and described by Dr Johnson as 'the most enlightened of the sons of men'. Unpublished poems and new letters shed fresh light upon Jones in rare moments of relaxation, while Franklin's research of the legal documents in the courts of the King's Bench, the Carmarthen circuit, and the Supreme Court of Bengal illustrates his passion for social justice, his legal acumen, and his principled independence.

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.

"Aryan," a word that today evokes images of racial hatred and atrocity, was first used by Europeans to suggest bonds of kinship, as Thomas Trautmann shows in his far-reaching history of British Orientalism and the ethnology of India. When the historical relationship uniting Sanskrit with the languages of Europe was discovered, it seemed clear that Indians and Britons belonged to the same family. Thus the Indo-European or Aryan idea, based on the principle of linguistic kinship, dominated British ethnological inquiry. In the nineteenth century, however, an emergent biological "race science" attacked the authority of the Orientalists. The spectacle of a dark-skinned people who were evidently civilized challenged Victorian ideas, and race science responded to the enigma of India by redefining the Aryan concept in narrowly "white" racial terms. By the end of the nineteenth century, race science and Orientalism reached a deep and lasting consensus in regard to India, which Trautmann calls "the racial theory of Indian civilization," and which he undermines with his powerful analysis of colonial ethnology in India. His work of reassessing British Orientalism and the Aryan idea will be of great interest to historians, anthropologists, and cultural critics.

Readings in Oriental Literature: Arabian, Indian, and Islamic is an up-to-date elucidation of some diverse and discrete, yet common and classic, subjects and authors, and the distinctive oriental elements present in them. The book, composed of fourteen essays, includes ancient Arabian poetry; the Arabian Nights; the Arabian desert; the Arabian influence on Melville; Shelley’s Orientalia; Coleridge’s Kubla Khan; the influence of English Romantics on the Bengali Tagore; Bangladesh’s national anthem, and her exiled daughter Taslima Nasreen; the Victorian reaction to British India; religious diversity and Islam in the West; the Muslim East in English literature; and reading literature from an Islamic point of view. Marked by an originality of approach and a freshness and simplicity, the book takes note of contemporary theoretical, interdisciplinary and cultural discourse drawn from literature, history, politics and religion as necessary. However, it is far from being unnecessarily weighed down by the loaded clichés, oft-repeated jargon and overused euphemisms of modern literary or critical theory. The result is, regardless of its specialized treatment of otherwise commonplace or well-known texts or topics, that the overall discussion is as lucid, introductory and expository as it is deep and scholarly, making the book accessible and understandable to non-specialist readers, in addition to specialist researchers and academics.

Revising traditional 'rise of the nation-state' narratives, this collection explores the development of and interactions among various forms of local, national, and transnational identities and affiliations during the long eighteenth century. By treating place as historically contingent and socially constructed, this volume examines how Britons experienced and related to a landscape altered by agricultural and industrial modernization, political and religious reform, migration, and the building of nascent overseas empires. In mapping the literary and cultural geographies of the long eighteenth century, the volume poses three challenges to common critical assumptions about the relationships among genre, place, and periodization. First, it questions the novel’s exclusive hold on the imagining of national communities by examining how poetry, drama, travel-writing, and various forms of prose fiction each negotiated the relationships between the local, national, and global in distinct ways. Second, it demonstrates how viewing the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century through a broadly conceived lens of place brings to the foreground authors typically considered 'minor' when seen through more traditional aesthetic, cultural, or theoretical optics. Finally, it contextualizes Romanticism’s long-standing associations with the local and the particular, suggesting that literary localism did not originate in the Romantic era, but instead emerged from previous literary and cultural explorations of space and place. Taken together, the essays work to displace the nation-state as a central category of literary and cultural analysis in eighteenth-century studies.

At a time of renewed interest in Empire, this stimulating volume explores the complex relationship between the Bible and the colonial enterprise, and examines some overlooked aspects of this relationship. These include unconventional retellings of the gospel story of Jesus by Thomas Jefferson and Raja Rammohun Roy; the fate of biblical texts when marshalled by Victorian preachers to strengthen British imperial intentions after the India uprising of 1857; the cultural-political use of the Christian Old Testament, first by the invaders to attack temple practices and rituals, then by the invaded to endorse the temple heritage scorned by missionaries; the dissident hermeneutics of James Long and William Colenso confronting and compromising with colonial ambitions; and finally the subtly seditious deployment of biblical citations in two colonial novels. This innovative book offers both practical and theoretical insights and provides compelling evidence of the continuing importance of postcolonial discourse for biblical studies.