Blending Orientalism and Romanticism: Keats’s Talismanic Lady in D. G. Rossetti and William Morris

This paper takes as its starting point the cognitive notion of blending investigated by Fauconnier and Turner (1994), in order to advance a new reading of D. G. Rossetti’s and William Morris’s Orientalism which sees it as a blending between Keats’s Romanticism and the fabulous and exotic Arabian Nights. Rossetti’s poems and double works of art as well as Morris’s The Earthly Paradise are imbued with the atmospheres of the Arabian Nights but also rely heavily on Keats’s Orientalism. I intend to track these references and, from a cognitive grammar perspective, look at the issues they raise – the influence of Keats’s Romanticism on Rossetti’s and Morris’s poems, the parabolic projection of Arabian stories onto Keats’s, Rossetti’s and Morris’s works. My central purpose will be to re-read Rossetti’s and Morris’s poems from a conceptual metaphor perspective. Such conceptual metaphors as «East is magic» and «East is sensuality» are projected in Rossetti’s poems and art as well as in Morris’s The Earthly Paradise as ways of representing the Oriental world. From Keats’s talismanic lady in La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Rossetti and Morris derive inspiration to create a fleshly Orientalism, or what Edward Said defined «the eminently corporeal».