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Following in the same vein as Southey's The Curse of Kehama and Thalaba, The Giaour combines Gothicism and Eastern exoticism to produce a tale of romance and revenge that clearly engages with its own socio-political context.¹ While its fragmentary style and abrupt changes in narrator produce a rich if daunting readerly experience, The Giaour's socio-political layering is equally complex, presenting a meditation on sexual freedom, set primarily in and around Athens under Ottoman rule, "indebted," as Marilyn Butler notes, "to a current controversy" over major ideological shifts in the governing of India, heralded by the Charter Act of 1813.² Following the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism, a considerable amount of scholarly attention has been directed toward the poem's position in relation to contemporaneous Orientalist discourses.³ The present chapter builds on this work, investigating the interconnection of freedom, community, and alterity within the poem and examining the ways in which this conjunction intersects with representations of the body as an object of fear and revulsion.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230306608_2

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