Noble Brutes
Regular price
€59.99
A01=Donna Landry
animal studies
Author_Donna Landry
British empire
British identity
Category=NHTB
Category=SK
Category=WNGH
East-West cultural exchange
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_sports-fitness
George Stubbs
horsemanship
Horses
Jonathan Swift
Ottoman empire
Ottomans
sporting art
Thoroughbred
Product details
- ISBN 9780801890284
- Weight: 476g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 27 Mar 2009
- Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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"His lordship's Arabian," a phrase often heard in eighteenth-century England, described a new kind of horse imported into the British Isles from the Ottoman Empire and the Barbary States of North Africa. Noble Brutes traces how the introduction of these Eastern blood horses transformed early modern culture and revolutionized England's racing and equestrian tradition. More than two hundred Oriental horses were imported into the British Isles between 1650 and 1750. With the horses came Eastern ideas about horsemanship and the relationship between horses and humans. Landry's groundbreaking archival research reveals how these Eastern imports profoundly influenced riding and racing styles, as well as literature and sporting art. After only a generation of crossbreeding on British soil, the English Thoroughbred was born, and with it the gentlemanly ideal of free forward movement over a country as an enactment of English liberties. This radical reinterpretation of Ottoman and Arab influences on horsemanship and breeding sheds new light on English national identity, as illustrated in such classic works as Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and George Stubbs's portrait of Whistlejacket.
Donna Landry is a professor of English at the University of Kent and author of The Invention of the Countryside: Hunting, Walking, and Ecology in English Literature, 1671-1831 and The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women's Poetry in Britain, 1739-1796.
