Reviews

Readers familiar with and sympathetic to critiques of Israel’s history of displacement and coercive control of the non-Jewish population of Palestine can appreciate the author’s approach.

[An] invaluable study.

A brilliant, impressive body of work.

[A] highly accomplished study.... Always interesting, politically radical and yet scholarly, this book makes a worthy successor to Said's Culture and Imperialism.

Saree Makdisi's incisive and insightful reading of Mayhew, Place, Wordsworth, Byron, Blake, Austen, Dickens, et al. brings into view a process of Orientalism internal to nineteenth-century English history that has remained largely unnoticed. His argument that the consolidation of the English view of themselves as a civilized nation necessarily entailed, not just the process of Orientalizing others but also a targeted othering of significant sections of the country's own population—a veritable civilizing mission at home that made England Western-unsettles received narratives of race and class in industrial England. This book will make it difficult for scholars henceforth to take the idea of Englishness for granted, or to think that Orientalism pertained to the Orient alone.

Tolerance is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial is an incisive and provocative treatise on the culture of denial that informs a series of contemporary affects, practices, and relations about Israel and Zionism.

Makdisi‘s timely study offers a powerfully lucid theoretical strategy for placing Romanticism within the frame of imperialism.

This is a book as much about the martial politics that structure liberalism as it is about Zionism and the settler colonial project in Palestine. Makdisi unravels the productive and destructive forces that normalize this project as part of global politics. Hence, the book is as much about us—the inheritors of liberalism sitting in Europe and North America—as it is about Palestine or the Israeli state.

Makdisi has emerged as one of the most incisive and influential surveyors of British literature and empire in the Romantic age.... Moves] seamlessly between discourses of social reform and inventive close readings of literary works, illustrations, and maps to chart the terra incognita-and 'tempus incognitum'-within the borders of England... Makdisi finds new critical possibilities available once one moves away from the East-West binary.

An erudite and intelligent study... At a juncture when the field of Victorian studies is animated by debates about the virtues of historicism, Makdisi's book is an especially edifying read..... Making England Western throws us profitably back onto the variety of crooked paths along which the field has traveled and reminds us that the question of how to think the Victorian period postcolonially remains an open and provocative one.

An extraordinarily detailed portrait. . . . Weaves together a tapestry of harrowing narratives in a lucid and measured tone.

Saree Makdisi's fascinating and necessary book succeeds both in providing a sympathetic revision of Said's Orientalism and in applying its basic thesis with great subtlety to a range of texts from canonical works like Lyrical Ballads and Mansfield Park. Written with verve and a genuine desire to enlighten us all, Making England Western will have a major impact on literary specialists, historians, students of Orientalism, and anyone with a general interest in the politics of culture.

Reading William Blake is not about careless readings but the most careful, brought to life by Makdisi’s own beautiful and precise critical prose.

[An] elegant work of literary theory that also has much to teach historians of race and class.

An original and brilliant interpretation of Romanticism which will have a significant impact on the way culture and imperialism are conceptualized. This invaluable contribution has the potential to alter our view of Romanticism, and speaks equally forcefully to scholars working in other fields, such as postcolonial theory, Victorian studies, cultural studies, literary theory, and materialist criticism.

This is a brief introduction to Blake that novices and seasoned Blakeans alike will enjoy and learn from. … The book is a celebration of Blake rather than a critique. It always expresses the critic’s own admiration and communicates this warmly to the reader. … It draws readers in, showing how puzzles and disjunctions can be productive, and how the play of children, reflections on the passage of time, artistic labor, ideas of eternity, and industrial work practices can be closely related in Blake’s thought. It is a book that will succeed very well in starting readers on a journey.

A lucid, invaluable chronicle of Palestinian daily life in the occupied territories.

One of the main strengths of Makdisi’s book - and a key reason as to why its approach is so clear and effective - is that the parameters of the project have been so carefully chosen. Makdisi anchors each of the chapters in a close reading of a poem from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, given that it is both accessible and widely available - and is also by far the most likely text with which any student of Blake will begin' … I will certainly be including Reading William Blake on my reading lists for students.

An immensely satisfying book. . . . powerful and necessary.

...Makdisi presents the reach and complexity of Blake's vision….