New Perspectives on Sir Richard Burton: Orientalism, the Cannibal Club and Victorian Ideas of Sex, Race and Gender, 2nd Edition

Product Description New Perspectives on Sir Richard Burton by Dr. John Wallen provides exactly that: a fresh perspective from which to view one of the leading explorers and writers of the Victorian age. Burton has frequently been vilified by postcolonial writers as somehow an archetypal representative of the colonial mentality that reached out to grab an often unknown world with its all-encompassing "imperial eyes". On the other hand, hardly any figure of the period has proved so enduringly popular with average readers and enthusiasts of the Victorian age. In this scholarly book, Dr. Wallen seeks to understand this dichotomy, tracing it back to Burton's creation of his own popular myth in his life and writings: a process of self aggrandizement that has been complicated by Edward Said's more recent ambiguity on the figure of Burton in his seminal work Orientalism. In this new and improved second edition of New Perspectives, prominence is given to Burton's own myth making and his little known activities as a member of the secretive Victorian men's club known as the "Cannibal Club". A Foreword is provided by Professor Dane Kennedy of George Washington University. Review ''I believe that a book on the mid-Victorian Cannibal Club is overdue as, although it has been dealt with superficially many times, there has never been a book length treatment which focuses clearly on the whole arc of its historical development and its relevance to the undercutting of the standard view of the Victorians as almost exclusively prude and moralistic about sex and pornography. Furthermore, the importance of the Cannibal Club extends beyond the subject of sexuality and into the fields of race and gender. A book length treatment gives us the opportunity to examine the ways in which this secretive men s club both reflected and helped to create some extreme Victorian ideas about race, sex and gender which, although a background theme to the more acceptable moral righteousness of the period, nevertheless has reverberated with powerful emphasis, even down to the present day. The result of this has been to create an ambiguous, but overlapping, secret place where normally respectable citizens might indulge their taste for extreme and elitist views in deviant but socially permitted ways.'' --R.L.Hanna, Georgetown About the Author Dr. John Wallen is an academic and writer who has lived in the Middle East for the last twenty years. He currently resides in the UAE. He is the publisher of a novel, a book of short stories and a collection of poetry under his own name. He has also published three books of short stories under the pseudonym of "Jon Aristides". In addition to his creative work, Dr. Wallen has published three books of criticism in the field of postcolonial theory. He is the Editor-in-Chief of "The Victorian" literary journal.