Date of Award
6-1931
Document Type
Thesis - Restricted
Degree Name
Master of Science (MS)
Department
English
First Advisor
Gilbert Macbeth
Abstract
Even before the conquest of India, some interest in the East had been aroused by such works as Rasselas by Johnson, Vathek by Beckford, and the Citizen of the World by Goldsmith. The Romantic poets also tended to search foreign literature for new fields from which to garner new and strange material for the settings and imagery of their poems. Thus Coleridge adopts an Eastern setting for his Kubla Khan; Southey writes tales in verse in which the setting is similar to the setting of the Arabian Nights; Byron wrote such poems as The Gaiour, The Bride of Abydos,
and The Corsair, with the near East as their setting; Leigh Hunt wrote Abou Ben Adhem and Jaffar; and after these came the popular Lalla Rookh of Thomas Moore with its Eastern setting.
With the acquisition of India by England in the middle portion of the nineteenth century, interest in the literature ·of the Orient increased. Scholars in the universities began to study earnestly the languages of the East. Some of these scholars studied to enable them to be of use in the diplomatic relations between the East and England; others were curious and took the courses in the languages merely because they were something new; but a few scholars were interested in the cultural advantages, both literary and scientific, that the Eastern languages opened up to Western civilization. Among the languages studied intensely was Persian, since Persian was widely spoken in some districts of India at that time.
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Recommended Citation
Campbell, Bernard Roi, "Edward Fitzgerald's Rubiayat of Omar Khayyam" (1931). Master's Theses (1922-2009) Access restricted to Marquette Campus. 5575.
https://epublications.marquette.edu/theses/5575