Historicizing The Sheik: comparisons of the British novel and the American film

This article begins with a brief discussion of existing scholars’ work on The Sheik before analyzing the differences between the novel and the film. These arise from Britain’s experience of sexuality, violence, and the World War I; understandings of whiteness and imperialism in Britain and the United States; the different historical experiences of gender, race, and ethnicity in the two countries; and finally, the different traditions of popular Orientalist discourse—anchored to a “realist” mode of representing the geopolitical situation of actual colonies in the case of Britain, and arising from fairground and merchandising fantasies of “Arabian Nights” Orientalism in the case of the U.S.A.