Need info on to what extent Burton could be considered an Orientalist and also which elements of the text support or deny this???help!!!!

Hi there!

Have you had a look at Edward Said's book "Orientalism"? It contains plenty of references to Burton, and to his position as a kind of brdge or link between East and West - Imperialist, yet Arabophile; critical of British policies, enamoured of the East...
As regards his standing as, or claim to be, an orientalist, I guess you have to look to his translations of Eastern texts, and above all to the (learned, humorous, irascible, "lateral")linguistic and anthropological footnotes and appendices he added: The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, the Kama Sutra (the recent translation by Wendy Doniger & Sudhir Kakar for Oxford University Press World's Classics examines Burton's translation in the Introduction), The Perfumed Garden (footnotes to - he translated it from a French translation)..., his account of his pilgrimage to Mecca...

Would it be worth "comparing and contrasting" Burton's work with that of his contemporaries or predecessors (e.g. Edward William Lane's "MAnners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians" and "Arab Society in the Time of The Thousand and One Nights" [= notes to his own translation], or perhaps the writings of that other pilgrim, J.L. Burckhardt)?

Robert Irwin, in his "The Arabian Nights:a companion", mentions a French scholar, Jean-François Gournay, whose doctoral thesis was on "L'appel du Proche-Orient: Richard F. Burton et son temps". Gournay also published "Burton: ambre et lumière de l'Orient" which contains a biographical essay on Burton, followed by an anthlogy of Burton's writings (translated into Frenc, of course.)

That's all I can think of at the moment. Hope ther's something her that you don't already know!