Mapping Persia and the Persians in Freya Stark’s the Valley of Assassins and Robert Byron’s the Road to Oxiana

ABSTRACT

This paper explores representations of Persia and the Persians in Freya Stark’s The Valley of Assassins (1934) and Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana (1937). Although these two travel accounts have been the subject of a few studies, the focus has been mostly on their architectural and stylistic aspects. Drawing on Orientalism, travel and gender theories, this article aims to offer a comparative look at Byron’s and Stark’s travel books in unravelling the ways they are informed by Orientalist attitudes in representing Persia and the Persians. Further, it aims to offer a nuanced reading of the role of a traveller’s gender on the textual construction of the self and the other and his/her relationship to the hegemonic Orientalist tradition. It will be argued that while Stark adopts an ambivalent attitude toward the encountered differences in Persia and her travel book is informed with self-exoticism and self-fashioning rhetoric, Byron deploys an authoritative Orientalist lens and his travel account is permeated with instances of feminizing the country he is travelling in and the men he encounters.

KEYWORDS:

• Orientalism
• travel narratives
• Persia
• gender
• representation
• Freya Stark
• Robert Byron

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Farah Ghaderi is an Assistant Professor in English Literature at Urmia University, Iran. Her main research areas include exoticism in travel writing, translation and postcolonial studies. Her recent research has focused on intercultural encounters and has appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture, Iranian Studies, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. Her co-translated work (Robert J C Young’s Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction) was published in Iran in 2012. Email: [email protected]

Soheila Habibzadeh holds an MA in English literature. Email: [email protected]