Overview

Turning Turk looks at contact between the English and other cultures in the early modern Mediterranean, and analyzes the representation of that experience on the London stage. Vitkus's book demonstrates that the English encounter with exotic alterity, and the theatrical representations inspired by that encounter, helped to form the emergent identity of an English nation that was eagerly fantasizing about having an empire, but was still in the preliminary phase of its colonizing drive. Vitkus' research shows how plays about the multi-cultural Mediterranean participated in this process of identity formation, and how anxieties about religious conversion, foreign trade and miscegenation were crucial factors in the formation of that identity.

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Reviews

Daniel Vitkus is one of a handful of scholars currently redrawing the map of East-West cultural relations in early modern Europe. In Turning Turk he offers a bold revision of widely held theoretical and historical assumptions about the discourse of Orientalism in the period. Vitkus decisively reorients our view of the drama of the period and shifts the center of the intellectual, political and dramatic focus of the period decisively eastwards. The result is a series of new and persuasive accounts of plays that we thought we understood, and many others that will no longer be ignored as marginal to the concerns of the early modern English stage thanks to Vitkus' book. --Dr. Jerry Brotton, Queen Mary, University of London, author of The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo <br> Daniel Vitkus's eagerly-awaited book situates a wide range of early modern English plays in relation to often-contradictory contemporary representations of Islam, the Ottoman 'Turk, ' ando

Daniel Vitkus is one of a handful of scholars currently redrawing the map of East-West cultural relations in early modern Europe. In Turning Turk he offers a bold revision of widely held theoretical and historical assumptions about the discourse of Orientalism in the period. Vitkus decisively reorients our view of the drama of the period and shifts the center of the intellectual, political and dramatic focus of the period decisively eastwards. The result is a series of new and persuasive accounts of plays that we thought we understood, and many others that will no longer be ignored as marginal to the concerns of the early modern English stage thanks to Vitkus' book. --Dr. Jerry Brotton, Queen Mary, University of London, author of The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo <br> Daniel Vitkus's eagerly-awaited book situates a wide range of early modern English plays in relation to often-contradictory contemporary representations of Islam, the Ottoman 'Turk, ' and the

Author Information

DANIEL VITKUS is Assistant Professor of English at Florida State University. He has published articles on English Renaissance drama and culture, on European representations of Islam, and on cross-cultural encounters in the early modern period. He is also the editor of Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England and Piracy, Slavery and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England.

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