Borrowed Imagination (eBook)

The British Romantic Poets and Their Arabic-Islamic Sources deals with the influence of specific Arabic materials on English Romantic poetry during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It reflects on philosophers and literary and cultural critics’ neglect of the role played by Arabs and Moslems in helping the British Romantic poets develop their themes, characters, imagery, and narrative modes. It also highlights the ambiguous feeling of the poets themselves toward the East.

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The British Romantic Poets and Their Arabic-Islamic Sources examines masterpieces of English Romantic poetry and shows the Arabic and Islamic sources that inspired Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley, Keats, and Byron when composing their poems in the eighteenth, or early nineteenth century. Critics have documented Greek and Roman sources but turned a blind eye to nonwestern materials at a time when the romantic poets were reading them. The book shows how the Arabic-Islamic sources had helped the British Romantic Poets not only in finding their own voices, but also their themes, metaphors, symbols, characters and images. The British Romantic Poets and Their Arabic-Islamic Sources is of interest to scholars in English and comparative literature, literary studies, philosophy, religion, government, history, cultural, and Middle Eastern studies and the general public.