ABSTRACT
Teachers of survey courses in British and American literature, or more general courses in the humanities, literature, history, or culture, may be eager to think about how they can explore representations of the Middle East and its peoples in their courses, and, when appropriate, connect those representations to more complete depictions in modern works from the region. Such teachers will be interested to learn that many of the authors they teach in their classes have written about the Middle East, including Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Shelly, Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Alcott, Melville, Twain, and more. Scholarship by Edward Said, Daniel Vitkus, Hilton Obenzinger, Jack D’Amico, David Bergeron, Nabil Matar, Luther Luedtke, Michael Stevens, and others drawing on new interest in multiculturalism and Orientalism provides us with important insights and comparative possibilities for teaching. In a brief way, this chapter points to opportunities to examine representations of the Middle East in survey courses where these topics have not been often examined but yet hold great potential for better understanding Western literature, and its long relationship with the Middle East. As we shall see, even characters as familiar as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn have surprising and interesting Middle Eastern connections! Drawing on this kind of investigation – and by using whole class, literature circle, or independent reading of contemporary texts – teachers of traditional courses can draw on historic and thematic connections to segue from authors they are currently teaching to many of the Middle Eastern works addressed throughout this volume.
