Fitzgerld's The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and the Religious Discourse of the Victorian Age

Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859) is the most famous translation ever made from Persian verse into English. FitzGerald’s poem was published in a very turbulent time in England. The present study tries to show that The Rubaiyat circulates one of the dominant discourses of the period in which it was written: the discourse of the religious doubt. To do so, a new historical reading of The Rubaiyat is employed. According to this approach literary texts are inseparable from their historical context. So, the literary text participates both in the construction and consolidation of the discourses. The Rubaiyat is no exception; it reflects the same discourse circulating (in literary and non-literary) at the time it was written. These texts are as follows: discoveries in Assyriology, religious books and treaties, poetic and prose works, and scientific books and treaties.