In art history, literature and cultural studies, Orientalism is the imitation or depiction of aspects in the Eastern world. These depictions are usually done by writers, designers, and artists from the Western world. In particular, Orientalist painting, depicting more specifically "the Middle East", was one of the many specialisms of 19th-century academic art, and the literature of Western countries took a similar interest in Oriental themes.
The Kama Sutra is an ancient Indian Sanskrit text on sexuality, eroticism and emotional fulfillment in life. Attributed to Vātsyāyana, the most ancient book on Kamasutra was composed in Abhira Kingdom. The Kama Sutra is neither exclusively nor predominantly a sex manual on sex positions, but rather was written as a guide to the art of living well, the nature of love, finding a life partner, maintaining one's love life, and other aspects pertaining to pleasure-oriented faculties of human life. It is a sutra-genre text with terse aphoristic verses that have survived into the modern era with different bhāṣyas. The text is a mix of prose and anustubh-meter poetry verses. The text acknowledges the Hindu concept of Purusharthas, and lists desire, sexuality, and emotional fulfillment as one of the proper goals of life. Its chapters discuss methods for courtship, training in the arts to be socially engaging, finding a partner, flirting, maintaining power in a married life, when and how to commit adultery, sexual positions, and other topics. The majority of the book is about the philosophy and theory of love, what triggers desire, what sustains it, and how and when it is good or bad.
Sir Richard Francis Burton was a British explorer, writer, scholar, and soldier. He was famed for his travels and explorations in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, as well as his extraordinary knowledge of languages and cultures. According to one count, he spoke twenty-nine European, Asian, and African languages.
Richard Barnfield was an English poet. His obscure though close relationship with William Shakespeare has long made him interesting to scholars. It has been suggested that he was the "rival poet" mentioned in Shakespeare's sonnets.
David Frawley is an American author, astrologer, teacher (acharya) and a proponent of Hindutva.
Henry Spencer Ashbee was a book collector, writer, and bibliographer. He is notable for his massive, clandestine three-volume bibliography of erotic literature published under the pseudonym of Pisanus Fraxi.
David Clive King was an English author best known for his children's book Stig of the Dump (1963). He served in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve in the last years of the Second World War and then worked for the British Council in a wide range of overseas postings, from which he later drew inspiration for his novels.
Edward Henry Palmer, known as E. H. Palmer, was an English orientalist and explorer.
Robert Graham Irwin is a British historian, novelist, and writer on Arabic literature.
Orientalism is a 1978 book by Edward W. Said, in which the author establishes the eponymous term "Orientalism" as a critical concept to describe the West's commonly contemptuous depiction and portrayal of "The East," i.e. the Orient. Societies and peoples of the Orient are those who inhabit the places of Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. Said argues that Orientalism, in the sense of the Western scholarship about the Eastern World, is inextricably tied to the imperialist societies who produced it, which makes much Orientalist work inherently political and servile to power.
Oriental studies is the academic field that studies Near Eastern and Far Eastern societies and cultures, languages, peoples, history and archaeology; in recent years the subject has often been turned into the newer terms of Middle Eastern studies and Asian studies. Traditional Oriental studies in Europe is today generally focused on the discipline of Islamic studies, while the study of China, especially traditional China, is often called Sinology. The study of East Asia in general, especially in the United States, is often called East Asian studies.
The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (1885), subtitled A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, is an English language translation of One Thousand and One Nights – a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age – by the British explorer and Arabist Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890). It stood as the only complete translation of the Macnaghten or Calcutta II edition of the "Arabian Nights" until the Malcolm C. and Ursula Lyons translation in 2008.
Hanne Blank, also known as Hanne Blank Boyd, is an American historian, writer, and editor. Her written works include Virgin: The Untouched History, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality, and The Unapologetic Fat Girl's Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts.
Édouard-Henri Avril was a French painter and commercial artist. Under the pseudonym Paul Avril, he was an illustrator of erotic literature. His career saw collaboration with influential people like Octave Uzanne, Henry Spencer Ashbee and Friedrich Karl Forberg.
Edward Wadie Said was a professor of literature at Columbia University, a public intellectual, and a founder of the academic field of postcolonial studies. A Palestinian American born in Mandatory Palestine, he was a citizen of the United States by way of his father, a U.S. Army veteran.
The Sufis is one of the best known books on Sufism by the writer Idries Shah. First published in 1964 with an introduction by Robert Graves, it introduced Sufi ideas to the West in a format acceptable to non-specialists at a time when the study of Sufism had largely become the reserve of Orientalists.
The Tombs is a 2012 adventure/thriller novel by Clive Cussler and Thomas Perry and the fourth book in the Fargo Adventures series. It was first published in the United States by G. P. Putnam's Sons on September 4, 2012.
Norman Mosley Penzer — known as N. M. Penzer — was a British independent scholar and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society who specialised in Oriental studies. He translated the tale of Nala and Damayanti in 1926 from Sanskrit.
The Cradle of Erotica: A Study of Afro-Asian Sexual Expression and an Analysis of Erotic Freedom in Social Relationships, more easily identified as The Cradle of Erotica, is a book written by Allen Edwardes and R. E. L. Masters, first published in 1963. The book explores the sexual practices and rituals of various ethnic groups from India, Africa, and Southeast Asia. The accuracy of the scholarship was disputed by many of its reviewers.
Pornographication or pornification is the absorption by mainstream culture of styles or content of the sex industry and the sexualisation of Western culture, sometimes referred to as raunch culture. Pornographication, particularly the use of sexualised images of women, is said to demonstrate "how patriarchal power operates in the field of gender representation". In Women in Popular Culture, Marion Meyers argues that the portrayal of women in modern society is primarily influenced by "the mainstreaming of pornography and its resultant hypersexualization of women and girls, and the commodification of those images for a global market".
