Abstract
Browning, although he never claimed to be an ‘Easternist’ or Orientalist, wrote extensively about the East, both as a Romantic and as a Victorian poet and dramatist. Browning derived his knowledge of the East through research and wide-ranging readings, steeped in mythology and classical knowledge, yet filtered by the lens of his own modernity. While Browning shared his contemporaries’ fascination with the East, he avoided the usual associational axes of ‘West and South’ and ‘North and South’ in favor of ‘North and East.’ In Browning’s work, the North-East dynamic is a dialogue between equal interlocutors: an intercultural, multilingual conversation. Browning’s writings are arabesque-like, interwoven with thematic and aesthetic threads. The figure of the arabesque, used by several Browning critics, is a metaphor for his work’s elaborate structure.
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Jaouad, H.A. (2018). Introduction: Browning upon Arabia. In: Browning Upon Arabia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92648-3_1
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