An Imagological Study of Freya Stark’s The Southern Gates of Arabia

Abstract

British travel writers were driven by an urge to find an elsewhere still unexplored, a place where a traveller could still become a pioneer, a heroic adventurer. The Orientalists who actually visited Arabia were struck by what they saw, by the exotic natural geography and the strange aspects of its inhabitants. And almost always they were attracted to the former and repelled by the latter. By using imagology as an approach of study, this dissertation addresses the question of how Arabia was portrayed in Freya Stark’s The Southern Gates of Arabia, through the extraction of the literary images of the people and the place and the analysis of the different strategies used in depicting them.