'Transported into Asiatic scenes': romanticism and the orient

As Britain extended its eastern empire through the Romantic period, the orient became imaginatively closer to Britons. As knowledge of eastern texts and geographies, as well as material objects and substances (such as fabrics, porcelain, tea and opium), were transported between east and west, these significant developments were registered in a variety of genres and styles, reflecting divergent political attitudes and aesthetic reactions. This essay selectively analyses early translations and imitations of classical eastern literatures by orientalists of the Asiatick Society; eastern poetry by William Jones and Lord Byron; metropolitan responses to material cultures associated with the orient by magazine essayists such as Charles Lamb and Thomas De Quincey; and early writings by eastern travellers to the west. These exemplify the diversity and extent of Romantic-period literary responses to the orient. From the charmingly domesticated to the grotesquely alien, the orient could generate widely disparate reactions in which relations of political power were inevitably embedded.