The present work examines the way in which the travels and journeys in Arabia and other Muslim lands of Richard Francis Burton, the nineteenth-century explorer and writer have, since the influential work of Edward W. Said on Orientalism, been somewhat undervalued by contemporaries. It aims to offer a re-evaluation of those works and their contribution to Victorian knowledge. It also offers a challenge to Said's account of Burton and, particularly in the second part of the book, looks at the negative ways in which Burton has been viewed more generally by post-colonial theorists since Said's...

A research monograph on the mid-Victorian rise of Sir Richard Burton, Orientalism and the phenomenon of the Cannibal Club is overdue as, although it has been dealt with superficially many times, there has never been a book length treatment which focuses clearly on the whole arc of its historical development and its relevance to the undercutting of the standard view of the Victorians as almost exclusively prudish and deeply moralistic about sex and pornography. Furthermore, the importance of the Cannibal Club extends beyond the subject of sexuality and into the fields of race and gender. This...

New Perspectives on Sir Richard Burton by Dr. John Wallen provides exactly that: a fresh perspective from which to view one of the leading explorers and writers of the Victorian age. Burton has frequently been vilified by postcolonial writers as somehow an archetypal representative of the colonial mentality that reached out to grab an often unknown world with its all-encompassing ""imperial eyes"". On the other hand, hardly any figure of the period has proved so enduringly popular with average readers and enthusiasts of the Victorian age. In this scholarly book, Dr. Wallen seeks to understand...