Homer's Turk [electronic resource] : how classics shaped ideas of the East / Jerry Toner.
Toner, J. P.
2013
DS61.85 .T66 2013eb
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Title Homer's Turk [electronic resource] : how classics shaped ideas of the East / Jerry Toner.
Author Toner, J. P.
ISBN 9780674076280 electronic book
0674073142 hardcover
9780674073142 hardcover
Imprint Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2013.
Language English
Description 1 online resource (x, 306 p.)
Call Number DS61.85 .T66 2013eb
Dewey Decimal Classification 950.072/041
Summary A seventeenth-century English traveler to the Eastern Mediterranean would have faced a problem in writing about this unfamiliar place: how to describe its inhabitants in a way his countrymen would understand? In an age when a European education meant mastering the Classical literature of Greece and Rome, he would naturally turn to touchstones like the Iliad to explain the exotic customs of Ottoman lands. His Turk would have been Homer's Turk.An account of epic sweep, spanning the Crusades, the Indian Raj, and the postwar decline of the British Empire, Homer's Turk illuminates how English writers of all eras have relied on the Classics to help them understand the world once called "(Bthe Orient." Ancient Greek and Roman authors, Jerry Toner shows, served as a conceptual frame of reference over long periods in which trade, religious missions, and imperial interests shaped English encounters with the East. Rivaling the Bible as a widespread, flexible vehicle of Western thought, the Classics provided a ready model for portrayal and understanding of the Oriental Other. Such image-making, Toner argues, persists today in some of the ways the West frames its relationship with the Islamic world and the rising powers of India and China. Discussing examples that range from Jacobean travelogues to Hollywood blockbusters, Homer's Turk proves that there is no permanent version of either the ancient past or the East in English writing--the two have been continually reinvented alongside each other.
Bibliography, etc. Note Includes bibliographical references and index.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
Source of Description Description based on print version record.
Available in Other Form Homer's Turk.
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Machine generated contents note: pt. I Contexts
1. Classicizing Orientalisms
2. The Uses of Classics
3. Classics and Medieval Images of Islam
pt. II Texts
4. Traders and Travelers
5. Gibbon's Islam
6. The Roman Raj
7. Empires Ancient and Modern
8. Colonial Adventures
pt. III Afterwords
9. Screen Classics
10. America Roma Nova.

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