Istanbul and the Ottoman Empire in Romantic and Victorian Culture

Piya Pal-Lapinski is Associate Professor of English at Bowling Green State University, USA. She is the author of The Exotic Woman in Nineteenth Century British Fiction and Culture (2004) and co-editor of Byron and the Politics of Freedom and Terror (2011). Her research focuses on the interdisciplinary and global contexts of nineteenth century literature and its intersections with contemporary theory.

Cutting through conventional binaries such as ‘East’ and ‘West’, ‘Orient’ and ‘Europe’, Piya Pal-Lapinski explores the ambiguities and restores the wonder of the Ottoman capital, Istanbul, as experienced by 19th-century British writers in their European context. The author’s personal fascination with the city today, no less than in history and the literary imagination, leaps off the page in this highly original study.

• List of Figures IntroductionChapter 1. The Stones of Constantinople: Walter Scott, The Last Man, and the Fossati restoration of the Hagia SophiaChapter 2. Byron Pasha in Istanbul with Shelley, Mozart and Rossini: The Seductions of Ottoman SovereigntyChapter 3. Champagne and Conversion: Thomas Hope’s Libertine on the Golden HornChapter 4. Janissaries, Devsirme, Vampirism: The Haunted Balkans and Lands of RumChapter 5. “Lend me a Pen of Fire:” Julia Pardoe’s City on the BosphorusChapter 6. Victorian Ottomania : Disraeli and TancredChapter 7. “The Sultan’s New Palace on the Bosphorus”: Imagining Dolmabahçe and beyondBibliography