Literary License and the West’s Romance with Afghanistan

Literary License and the West's Romance with Afghanistan analyzes the role literature and poetic sensibility played in colonial British and American writings on Afghanistan from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. It also considers the role that literature and literariness, itself, have played in western discourses framing Afghanistan. The British Romantic Orientalists of the 19th century studied the region in-depth and were drawn to what they perceived as an alien space where they could remake themselves in print and in life.

These writers and those who followed including scholars, civil servants, and wives or professional women were inspired by the region and sometimes crossed ethnic, national, and imaginative boundaries. This book explores the connections that were forged in print through fantastic and familiar assumptions regarding the region and its people.