ABSTRACT
Arabia is part of the West’s “imagined geographies”, and travellers throughout history have written about the region through the lens of Orientalism. This book sets out to determine whether Arabian desert literature, which arguably reached its apotheosis in the work of Thesiger, offers only a barren legacy for belated Western writers, beguiled by this long history of imaginative engagement, or whether it is redeemed within a new critical and globalised context. The introduction sets up the parameters of this discussion by locating “Arabia” in the modern Middle East, briefly reviewing the history of travel writing that leant to the desert’s fluid borders and examining the desert trope in relation to Arab urban modernities. In so doing, it presents desert literature as an opportunity, albeit in microcosm, to consider many of today’s critical issues relating to appropriate cultural interaction, responsible travel, and the protection of unique environments. The works of T. E. Lawrence and Wilfred Thesiger, whose literary legacies loom large over subsequent generations of desert travel writers, foreground the discussion on modern desert texts brought to critical attention in succeeding chapters while referencing Edward Said’s seminal work, Orientalism, which continues to exert critical influence over 40 years after its original publication.
