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Biblical alterity and discourses of Othering in the Bohemian early modern travel literature

Publication at Faculty of Humanities |
2009

Abstract

The article is concerned with ways how Oriental Other, seen as a textual effect, was performed in the early modern travelogues on Holy Land and Islamic Near East. At first the author analyzes a so-called Biblical alterity, where the route of pilgrimage itself as well as traveller´s experience and representations of a landscape and Orientals were intertextually determined by the Holy Scripture.

Above all the period´s literary practice („writing in excerpts“) caused Bible became the basic subtext of early modern Near East travelogues. A particular form of an early modern Orientalism that could be thematised in Harant´s Putování (1608) is considered as the second mode of the period´s Othering.

It developed a complex imagination of the Other – operating among others with discourses of sexualized and disgusting oriental body –, which criticised the oriental civilisation and Islamic religious practices and performed them in an inferior position to the European Christian social order.