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Looking East: English writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800

Category: Ottoman History
Type: Book
Author: MacLean, Gerald M.
Pages: 328
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780230019676
Library catalog: British Library
Year: 2007
Google books link: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=BI0LAQAAMAAJ
Language: en
Tags: British     English literature     Great Britain     Great Britain - Relations - Turkey     History / Europe / General     History / Middle East / General     Literary Criticism / European / English     Irish     Scottish     Welsh     political science     

Abstract:

Looking East explores early modern English attitudes toward the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century. To a nation just arriving on the international scene, the Ottoman Empire was at once the great enemy and scourge of Christendom, and at the same time the fabulously wealthy and magnificent court from which the sultan ruled over three continents with his great and powerful army. By taking the imaginative, literary and poetic writing about the Ottoman Turks and putting it alongside contemporary historical documents, the book shows that fascination with the Ottoman Empire shaped how the English thought about and represented their own place within the world as a nation with increasing imperial ambitions of its own.



The research project is implemented within the framework of the Action “Supporting Postdoctoral Researchers» of the Operational Program "Education and Lifelong Learning" (Action’s Beneficiary: General Secretariat for Research and Technology), and is co-financed by the European Social Fund (ESF) and the Greek State.