Iran and French Orientalism

"Iran and Persian culture hold a distinct place in the imagination of nineteenth-century France; from the poetry of Victor Hugo and Armand Renaud to the travel writing of Jane Dieulafoy. This is the first monograph on the French reception of Iranian culture, history, and literature in the period spanning from Romanticism to the turn of the twentieth century. Covering both canonical and forgotten authors and comprising four genres: lyric poetry; history and historical fiction; travel-writing; and the performing arts, the book brings a new approach to the analysis of nineteenth-century French Orientalism: one that focuses on an individual civilisation rather than a generic 'Orient', looks beyond France's colonial empire, and considers the impact of genre. This results in a more nuanced picture, in which the dehumanising 'othering' famously described by Edward Said in Orientalism exists alongside examples of admiration, familiarisation, and identification. Nineteenth-century French writers tested the Occident/Orient dichotomy, emphasising it or eroding it based on the image of Iran that they sought to promote. These narratives ranged from the Aryan myth to an enthusiasm for Sufi poetry. The book also analyses the author's sources, which ranged from Persian literature, Islamic theology and Iranian cultural customs to Iranian architecture. The case of Iran thus gives us new transnational insights into nineteenth-century France's ambivalent definitions of cultural difference and their exploration in literature and the arts"--