New Perspectives on Sir Richard Burton: Orientalism, The Cannibal Club and Victorian Ideas of Sex, Race and Gender, 2nd Edition

Author: 

Wallen, John

Credentials: 

Ph.D, Royal Holloway; Assistant Professor D/English, University of Sharjah, UAE

New Perspectives on Sir Richard Burton by Dr. John Wallen provides exactly that: a fresh perspective from which to view one of the leading explorers and writers of the Victorian age. Burton has frequently been vilified by postcolonial writers as somehow an archetypal representative of the colonial mentality that reached out to grab an often unknown world with its all-encompassing "imperial eyes". On the other hand, hardly any figure of the period has proved so enduringly popular with average readers and enthusiasts of the Victorian age. In this scholarly book, Dr. Wallen seeks to understand this dichotomy, tracing it back to Burton's creation of his own popular myth in his life and writings: a process of self aggrandizement that has been complicated by Edward Said's more recent ambiguity on the figure of Burton in his seminal work Orientalism. In this new and improved second edition of New Perspectives, prominence is given to Burton's own myth making and his little known activities as a member of the secretive Victorian men's club known as the "Cannibal Club". A Foreword is provided by Professor Dane Kennedy of George Washington University.

Market: 
Victorian studies, English Intellectual History 19th c, The Literature of Race and Gender in Victorian England, Historical Anthropology 19c,Political and Social Elites and Empire, Roots of European Racism, Sir Richard Burton, Algernon Swinburne, Lord Houghton, James Hunt, Racial and Cultural Superiority as a pseudo-scientific “fact”, Sex and pornography in mid and late Victorian England, Feminism, Post Colonial literary theory
Release Date: 
April 15, 2017
ISBN: 
Hardcover: 978-1-680530-27-8
Price: 
$79.95
Trim Size: 
6x9
Pages: 
205
Illustrations: 
Yes
Publisher: 

Academica Press
1727 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Suite 507
Washington, DC 20036
academicapress.editorial@gmail.com
(978) 829-2577