Secret Sins of the Orient: Creating a (Homo)Textual Context for Reading Byron’s The Giaour

Focuses on the way sexual excesses inscribed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Oriental discourses served to open up "queer" spaces in Romantic literature, while analyzing the degree to which the master narrative of British colonial domination was in part dependent on narratives of the sexual degeneracy of the Other. Focuses on Byron’s "The Giaour" to illustrate the workings of "homotextuality."