Charles Montagu Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888) is remarkable for its scientific evelations and brilliantly unique style—an artful combination of Arabic and English syntax and diction that rendered a foreign way of life and thought and depicted a distant landscape of stark, barren beauty. The ten original essays in this book examine many aspects of Arabia Deserta, including its Victorian characteristics and aesthetics; its blend of fact and fantasy; its portrayal of Arab society and of Doughty himself; and the accuracy of its geographical, geological, archaeological, historical, and ethnographical observations. Additionally, the book's introduction and two bibliographies probe Arabia Deserta's reception, unique position in the genre of travel literature, and bibliographical history. During the grueling twenty-one-month journey narrated in Arabia Deserta, Doughty endured periods of sickness and near-famine, a series of treacherous guides, attack by a mob, and virtual imprisonment by a corrupt Turkish commandant. Celebrating this epic of scholarship and survival, Explorations in Doughty's "Arabia Deserta" maps the contours of a work that T. E. Lawrence, who had followed Doughty's path to Arabia, called "a book not like other books, but something particular, a bible of its kind."

From the early 1920s to the late 1960s, T. E. Lawrence's life and career were largely the subject of sensationalist speculation, fired mainly by the romantic image of “Lawrence of Arabia.” Then, as the result of various political, scholarly, and intellectual developments, study of Lawrence's career and influence began to take on a new aspect. This collection of fourteen essays, including Stephen E. Tabachnick's extensive introduction, provides balanced and fully documented analyses of Lawrence's multifaceted career by an international group of scholars. The T. E. Lawrence Puzzle will appeal to Lawrence experts and to general readers interested in objective, reasoned perspectives on a brilliant polymath with a fascinating personality, whose many achievements remain very relevant to our own times.

A Generic History of Travel Writing in Anglophone and Polish Literature offers a comprehensive, comparative and generic analysis of developments of travel writing in Anglophone and Polish literature from the Late Medieval Period to the twenty-first century. These developments are depicted in a wider context of travel narratives written in other European languages.

Reading Arabia traces the evolving tradition of British Orientalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, examining the role of mass print culture in constructing the British public’s perception of “Arabia.” Long brings together close readings and ideological analyses of primary texts by Richard Burton, Charles Doughty, Robert Cunninghame Graham, Marmaduke Pickthall, and T. E. Lawrence, along with pamphlets, journalism and commentary, silent films, stage spectacles, and travel literature. Through these texts, Long examines the fantasy of the Orient and its constitutive function. Building on the pioneering work of Edward Said, Reading Arabia looks beyond foreign policy debates and issues of human rights to show how British Orientalism is rooted in words and phrases of a popular culture that shaped the way the public read and imagined the Arab world.

A detailed study of the role of religious worship and spiritual affairs in women's lives in the twentieth-century Arab world.

In this groundbreaking book, Priya Satia tracks the intelligence community's tactical grappling with this problem and the myriad cultural, institutional, and political consequences of their methodological choices during and after the Great War.

While the twentieth century’s conflicting visions and exploitation of the Middle East are well documented, the origins of the concept of the Middle East itself have been largely ignored. With Dislocating the Orient, Daniel Foliard tells the story of how the land was brought into being, exploring how maps, knowledge, and blind ignorance all participated in the construction of this imagined region. Foliard vividly illustrates how the British first defined the Middle East as a geopolitical and cartographic region in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through their imperial maps. Until then, the region had never been clearly distinguished from “the East” or “the Orient.” In the course of their colonial activities, however, the British began to conceive of the Middle East as a separate and distinct part of the world, with consequences that continue to be felt today. As they reimagined boundaries, the British produced, disputed, and finally dramatically transformed the geography of the area—both culturally and physically—over the course of their colonial era. Using a wide variety of primary texts and historical maps to show how the idea of the Middle East came into being, Dislocating the Orient will interest historians of the Middle East, the British empire, cultural geography, and cartography.

The Dutch scholar Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857–1936) was one of the most famous orientalists of his time. He acquired early fame through his daring research in Mecca in 1884-85, masterly narrated in two books and accompanied by two portfolios of photographs. As an adviser to the colonial government in the Dutch East Indies from 1889 until 1906, he was on horseback during campaigns of “pacification” and published extensively on Indonesian cultures and languages. Meanwhile he successively married two Sundanese women with whom he had several children. In 1906 he became a professor in Leiden and promoted together with colleagues abroad the study of modern Islam, meant to be useful for colonial purposes. Despite his considerable scholarly, political, and cultural influence in the first decades of the twentieth century, nowadays Snouck Hurgronje has been almost forgotten outside a small circle of specialists, since he mainly published in Dutch and German. The contributors to this volume each offer new insights about this enigmatic scholar and political actor who might be considered a classic proponent of “orientalism.” Their detailed studies of his life and work challenge us to reconsider common views of the history of the study of Islam in European academia and encourage a more nuanced “post-orientalist” approach with ample attention for cooperation, exchange, and hybridization. Contributors: