William Beckford's Vathek and Edward W. Said's Concept of Orientalism

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject Didactics - English - Literature Works grade: 20 RWTH Aachen University (Anglistik) course: HS Gothic Novel language: English abstract: The purpose of this present survey is to investigate features of Edward Said''s concept of Orientalism in William Beckford''s Vathek. It intends to examine how far Beckford''s novel reflects the standardization and cultural stereotyping that have helped to intensify the grasp of the imaginative demonology of the mysterious East (Said 2003:26). Therefore I will at first present an introduction of Said''s concept of Orientalism in order to be able to distinguish features of Orientalism in Beckford''s novel in the main body of my term paper. The main focus will be on: Violence and evilness homoeroticism sensuality and religion. The most important sources for my term paper are evidently Edward Said''s book Orientalism which has been first published in 1978 and William Beckford''s novel Vathek(1786) which was originally written in French and translated into English by Reverent Samuel Henley (Khrisat 2001: 192). Even though many scholars seem to have studied Said''s notion of Orientalism in the scope of literary works like for example Eric Meyer and Bernard Lewis there seem to exist few researches which are merely based on Orientalism in Vathek. However the most important resource for this paper is Muna Al-Alwana''s survey about Orientalism in Beckford''s novel next to Jeffrey Cass''s study who has investigated Vathek in respect to Orientalism and Homoeroticism. The most important resource for this paper is Muna Al-Alwana''s survey.