Shelley's Strategy to Orientalism in Alastor; Or, the Spirit of Solitude

Abstract

In Orientalism, Edward Said used the term "strategy" to refer to "the problem every writer of the Orient has faced: how to get hold of it, how to approach it, how not to be defeated or overwhelmed by its sublimity, its scope, its dimension" (Said, 20). Clearly, Said's definition of the term implies the difficulty of the orientalist's task, i.e. penetrating the Orient's realms and characters and framing them to the English audience. Paradoxically, this task poses a danger on the subjectivity of the Orientalist, who is positioned as an observer, by the different aspects of the observed object itself, leaving him/her in an overwhelming state of defeat as Said points out. This task is deemed harder for the Romantic poets, whose ideological project of cultural universalism seems to be hard to extend in the Orient's realm. In this paper, the researcher sheds the lights on Percy Shelley's strategy to the Orient, his subjectivity, and his cultural universalism. In doing so, the researcher will discuss Shelly's Alastor; Or The Spirit of Solitude in relation to the previously mentioned aspects with directs references to the poem.