Scholarship or Pornography: The Sexual Imaginary of the Colonised in Richard Francis Burton’s edition of The Book of a Thousand Nights and One Night - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2021

Scholarship or Pornography: The Sexual Imaginary of the Colonised in Richard Francis Burton’s edition of The Book of a Thousand Nights and One Night

Résumé

One Thousand and One Nights, a collection of middle-eastern folk tales, found its way into literary England for the first time in 1709, translated from the French edition of Antoine Galland. It was however the edition established by Edward William Lane between 1838 and 1840 that an English version of the work has been translated directly from the modern Arabic texts called Alf Layla Wa Layla, literally ‘a thousand nights and a night’, an Egyptian branch of Bulaq. This text is considered a scholarly text, a precise and abundant documentary proof of the culture and customs of eastern material life, and not anymore as entertaining tales for children like Galland’s edition. Nonetheless, Lane’s version suffered a criticism for its erudition and negligence of the literary value of the original Arabic work. John Payne was of this opinion and decided to establish another edition between 1882 and 1884 which focused more on its literary qualities than on its anthropological aspect as a documentary piece of work. The most polemical version, though, was that established by Richard Francis Burton between 1885 and 1888. This version was shocking and rocking the Victorian society at the time. In the same manner of Lane’s version, Burton shared an obsession with colossal annotations and took The Thousand and One Nights as anthropological documentary texts while at the same time restored and amplified the erotic elements entirely purged in Lane’s version. And like Payne’s version, the text was translated in a literal way. Because of its sexually explicit scenes, Burton’s edition triggered a national debate on its content. Ones considered it a pure literary and scholarly work and the others a pornographic work and a threat to the Victorian values. This research aims therefore to discuss, through the lens of orientalism and literary translation, how the sexual imaginary of the colonized, or the culturally Other, in the text is used, throughout its polemical debate, to promote a colonial discourse for its orientalist and anthropological value and at the same time a criticism by Burton on the pretentious prudishness of the Victorian society in matters of sexuality.
Fichier non déposé

Dates et versions

hal-04415881 , version 1 (24-01-2024)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-04415881 , version 1

Citer

Pariwat Sukwichai. Scholarship or Pornography: The Sexual Imaginary of the Colonised in Richard Francis Burton’s edition of The Book of a Thousand Nights and One Night. Decolonising Language, Literary and Cultural studies 2021, The Integrative Center for Humanities Innovations, University of Chiang Mai, Jun 2021, Chiang Mai, Thailand. ⟨hal-04415881⟩
5 Consultations
0 Téléchargements

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More