Sax Romer's Use of Oriental Words in His Fiction
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Date
2005-12-07
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Abstract
Sax Rohmer (the pseudonym of Arthur Sarsfield Ward, 1883-1959) was one of the most widely read pop authors in the English-speaking world in the 20th century. His Fu Manchu first appeared in "The Zayat Kiss," in the British magazine Story-Teller (October 1912), followed by the novel The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu in 1913. After World War II Rohmer changed this sinister Chinese arch-criminal into a heroic anti-Communist. Further thrilled by radio versions, feature films, stage plays, television series, and even a Marvel comic book, millions of readers have shuddered in Rohmer's auras of tomb robbers, ancient Egyptian demons haunting asp-infested tunnels beneath the pyramids, voodoo rites and zombies, and vampires, communicated by carefully selected eastern lexical borrowings. In 1951 he introduced the glamorous witch Sumuru as a female Fu Manchu in five well-received novels.
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Alchemy, Ancient Egypt, Anthropology, Arabic language and culture, Chinese culture and people, Agatha Christie, Comparative Studies, Drugs, Egypt, Fu Manchu, Islam, Sir William Jones, Edward W Lane, Lexicography, Linguistics, Literature, Mahound (=Mahummad), Oxford English Dictionary, Persian language and culture, Edgar Allen Poe, Pyramids, Sax Rohmer, Semantics, Sociology, Sorcery, Tarzan, Word borrowings, Yello Peril, H. G. Wells