Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels

by Hsu-Ming Teo

The Sheik—E. M. Hull's best-selling novel that became a wildly popular film starring Rudolph Valentino—kindled "sheik fever" across the Western world in the 1920s. A craze for all things romantically "Oriental" swept through fashion, film, and literature, spawning imitations and parodies without number. While that fervor has largely subsided, tales of passion between Western women and Arab men continue to enthrall readers of today's mass-market romance novels. In this groundbreaking cultural history, Hsu-Ming Teo traces the literary lineage of these desert romances and historical bodice rippers from the twelfth to the twenty-first century and explores the gendered cultural and political purposes that they have served at various historical moments. Drawing on "high" literature, erotica, and popular romance fiction and films, Teo examines the changing meanings of Orientalist tropes such as crusades and conversion, abduction by Barbary pirates, sexual slavery, the fear of renegades, the Oriental despot and his harem, the figure of the powerful Western concubine, and fantasies of escape from the harem. She analyzes the impact of imperialism, decolonization, sexual liberation, feminism, and American involvement in the Middle East on women's Orientalist fiction. Teo suggests that the rise of female-authored romance novels dramatically transformed the nature of Orientalism because it feminized the discourse; made white women central as producers, consumers, and imagined actors; and revised, reversed, or collapsed the binaries inherent in traditional analyses of Orientalism.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Gender, Feminism, Romance

344 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Malaysian-born Australian novelist.

Hsu-Ming Teo moved to Castle Hill, Sydney at the age of seven. Upon leaving school she began studying Medicine but changed to Arts in her second year of university. She has tutored at both Macquarie University and the University of Sydney, where she was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1998 on the subject of British women's travel writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Reviews

[Tamara]

This is really good, I guess, if you happen to be extremely interested in its very particular subject matter. Which I am (I wish I knew why.) I appreciated the thorough overview of the historical evolution of the genre, going back to medieval legends, Barbary corsairs and (of course) Byron.