The highly civilized man : Richard Burton and the Victorian world
Richard Burton was one of Victorian Britain's most protean figures. A soldier, explorer, ethnographer, and polyglot of rare power, as well as a poet, travel writer, and translator of the tales of the Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra, Burton exercised his abundant talents in a diverse array of endeavors. Though best remembered as an adventurer who entered Mecca in disguise and sought the source of the White Nile, Burton traveled so widely, wrote so prolifically, and contributed so forcefully to his generation's most contentious debates that heprovides us with a singularly panoramic perspective on the world of theVictorians. One of the great challenges confronting the British in the nineteenth century was to make sense of the multiplicity of peoples and cultures they encountered in their imperial march around the globe. Burton played an important role in this mission. Drawing on his wide-ranging experiences in other lands and intense curiosity about their inhabitants, he conducted an intellectually ambitious, highly provocative inquiry into racial, religious, and sexual differences that exposed his own society's norms to scrutiny. Dane Kennedy offers a fresh and compelling examination of Burton and his contribution to the widening world of the Victorians. He advances the view that the Victorians' efforts to attach meaning to the differences they observed among other peoples had a profound influence on their own sense of self, destabilizing identities and reshaping consciousness. Engagingly written and vigorously argued, The Highly Civilized Man is an important contribution to our understanding of a remarkable man and a crucial era
History
1 online resource (354 pages) : illustrations, portraits
9780674039483, 0674039483
647823711
Contents
Introduction
I. The Gypsy
II. The Orientalist
III. The Impersonator
IV. The Explorer
V. The Racist
VI. The Relativist
VII. The Sexologist
VIII. The Afterlife
A Note on Sources
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
archive.org Free eBook from the Internet Archive
openlibrary.org Additional information and access via Open Library