Orientalism and Literature discusses a key critical concept in literary studies and how it assists our reading of literature. It reviews the concept's evolution: how it has been explored, imagined and narrated in literature. Part I considers Orientalism's origins and its geographical and multidisciplinary scope, then considers the major genres and trends Orientalism inspired in the literary-critical field such as the eighteenth-century Oriental tale, reading the Bible, and Victorian Oriental fiction. Part II recaptures specific aspects of Edward Said's Orientalism: the multidisciplinary contexts and scholarly discussions it has inspired (such as colonial discourse, race, resistance, feminism and travel writing). Part III deliberates upon recent and possible future applications of Orientalism, probing its currency and effectiveness in the twenty-first century, the role it has played and continues to play in the operation of power, and how in new forms, neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia, it feeds into various genres, from migrant writing to journalism.

China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a model of economic and political strength, viewed by many as the greatest empire in the world. While the importance of China to eighteenth-century English consumer culture is well documented, less so is its influence on English values. Through a careful study of the literature, drama, philosophy, and material culture of the period, this book articulates how Chinese culture influenced English ideas about virtue. Discourses of virtue were significantly shaped by the intensified trade with the East Indies. Chi-ming Yang focuses on key forms of virtue—heroism, sincerity, piety, moderation, sensibility, and patriotism—whose meanings and social importance developed in the changing economic climate of the period. She highlights the ways in which English understandings of Eastern values transformed these morals. The book is organized by type of performance—theatrical, ethnographic, and literary—and by performances of gender, identity fraud, and religious conversion. In her analysis of these works, Yang brings to light surprising connections between figures as disparate as Confucius and a Chinese Amazon and between cultural norms as far removed as Hindu reincarnation and London coffeehouse culture. Part of a new wave of cross-disciplinary scholarship, where Chinese studies meets the British eighteenth century, this novel work will appeal to scholars in a number of fields, including performance studies, East Asian studies, British literature, cultural history, gender studies, and postcolonial studies.

A groundbreaking critique of the West's historical, cultural, and political perceptions of the East that is—three decades after its first publication—one of the most important books written about our divided world. "Intellectual history on a high order ... and very exciting." —The New York Times In this wide-ranging, intellectually vigorous study, Said traces the origins of "orientalism" to the centuries-long period during which Europe dominated the Middle and Near East and, from its position of power, defined "the orient" simply as "other than" the occident. This entrenched view continues to dominate western ideas and, because it does not allow the East to represent itself, prevents true understanding.

Srinivas Aravamudan here reveals how Oriental tales, pseudo-ethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political satires took Europe by storm during the eighteenth century. Naming this body of fiction Enlightenment Orientalism, he poses a range of urgent questions that uncovers the interdependence of Oriental tales and domestic fiction, thereby challenging standard scholarly narratives about the rise of the novel. More than mere exoticism, Oriental tales fascinated ordinary readers as well as intellectuals, taking the fancy of philosophers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot in France, and writers such as Defoe, Swift, and Goldsmith in Britain. Aravamudan shows that Enlightenment Orientalism was a significant movement that criticized irrational European practices even while sympathetically bridging differences among civilizations. A sophisticated reinterpretation of the history of the novel, Enlightenment Orientalism is sure to be welcomed as a landmark work in eighteenth-century studies.

Intelligent Souls? offers a new understanding of Islam in eighteenth-century Britain. Cahill explores two overlapping strands of thinking about women and Islam, which produce the phenomenon of “feminist orientalism.” One strand describes seventeenth-century ideas about the nature of the soul used to denigrate religio-political opponents. A second tracks the transference of these ideas to Islam during the Glorious Revolution and the Trinitarian controversy of the 1690s. The confluence of these discourses compounded if not wholly produced the stereotype that Islam denied women intelligent souls. Surprisingly, women writers of the period accepted the stereotype, but used it for their own purposes. Rowe, Carter, Lennox, More, and Wollstonecraft, Cahill argues, established common ground with men by leveraging the “otherness” identified with Islam to dispute British culture’s assumption that British women were lacking in intelligence, selfhood, or professional abilities. When Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman she accepted that view as true—and “feminist orientalism” was born, introducing a fallacy about Islam to the West that persists to this day. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Focuses on the cultural, philosophical, political, and scholarly uses of "orientalism" in the German-speaking and Central and Eastern European worlds from the late eighteenth century to the present day. The concept and study of orientalism in Western culture gained a changed understanding from Edward Said's now iconic 1978 book Orientalism. However, recent debate has moved beyond Said's definition of the phenomenon, highlighting the multiple forms of orientalism within the "West," the manifold presence of the "East" in the Western world, indeed the epistemological fragility of the ideas of "Occident" and "Orient" as such. This volume focuses on the deployment -- here the cultural, philosophical, political, and scholarly uses -- of "orientalism" in the German-speaking and Central and Eastern European worlds from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Its interdisciplinary approach combines distinguished contributions by Indian scholars, who approach the topic of orientalism through the prism of German studies as practiced in Asia, with representative chapters by senior German, Austrian, and English-speaking scholars working at the intersection of German and oriental studies. Contributors: Anil Bhatti, Michael Dusche, Johannes Feichtinger, Johann Heiss, James Hodkinson, Kerstin Jobst, Jon Keune, Todd Kontje, Margit Köves, Sarah Lemmen, Shaswati Mazumdar, Jyoti Sabarwal, Ulrike Stamm, John Walker. James Hodkinson is Associate Professor in German Studies at Warwick University. John Walker is Senior Lecturer in EuropeanCultures and Languages at Birkbeck College, University of London. Shaswati Mazumdar is Professor in German at the University of Delhi. Johannes Feichtinger is a Researcher at the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften.

Examining and historicizing the concept of "otherness" in both literature and criticism, Lisa Lowe explores representations of non-European cultures in British and French writings from the eighteenth through the twentieth century. Lowe traces the intersections of culture, class, and sexuality in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters and Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes and discusses tropes of orientalism, racialism, and romanticism in Flaubert. She then turns to debates in Anglo-American and Indian criticism on Forster’s Passage to India and on the utopian projection of China in the poststructuralist theories of Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes and in the journal Tel Quel.

In 1798, Napoléon I launched his Egyptian Campaign and opened what has become recognized as the canonic period of French Orientalism, which extends from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century. As defined by Edward W. Said (Orientalism, 1978), Orientalism is intrinsically Eurocentric and places the Orient in opposition to the European West as the quintessentially foreign Other. In this sense, the Occident supposedly defines itself by gazing at the East as its inverse image and purportedly asserts a geopolitical dominance materially confirmed through imperialism and colonization. Although Europe may cast the Orient as the archetypal Other, this necessarily entails deep conflict since the Orient is also frequently posited as the source of Western civilization, which prohibits the articulation of a complete separation between Europe and the Orient. Nevertheless, according to French Orientalist discourse, the East had fallen into barbarism, inertia, and languished, awaiting the mission civilisatrice by which France undertook a heroic project of universal enlightenment. The canonic approach to Orientalism has drawn much criticism, which calls for re-examining the notion of French Orientalism, broadening the scope of enquiry, and exploring the history and ideological strategies behind French formulations of the Orient from the Middle Ages through the twenty-first century. Such an expanded field of investigation reveals that the canonic Orientalist paradigm is not universally applicable, particularly regarding material from before the late eighteenth century. New theoretical, literary, historical, philosophical, and cultural perspectives provide the opportunity to deploy, question, subvert, and resituate canonic Orientalist theories, revealing the continuing evolution and relevance of French Orientalism as a notion with global stakes and material consequences. Because of its broad scope and variety of theoretical approaches, this volume will interest scholars and students from a wide spectrum of disciplines, including literature, gender studies, history, theater, art history, music, cinema, and cultural studies.

Inspired by the growing interest in oriental countries and cultures, Hasan Baktir examines the representation of the "Ottoman Orient" in 18th century English literature, taking a new perspective to achieve a comprehensive understanding and investigating different aspects of the interaction between the Ottoman Orient and 18th century Europe.A number of questions continue to arise in the wake of Said's 1978 landmark study, "Orientalism". How monodirectional was the flow of power in such representations? To what extent did the travelling observer also participate and become influenced by the phenomena he tried to depict without attachment? What variety of motivations lay behind the desire to know and represent the Oriental other -- was it simply a question of political control? Or were there deeper, more enigmatic factors at play -- sexuality, existential affirmation, even utter idiosyncrasy? How various and diverse was the Western response to the East -- can we discern degrees of sympathy, knowledge, and difference in the various Orients offered to us by the canonical and non-canonical figures of 18th century English letters? Baktir's study provides answers to many aspects of these questions, through a detailed examination of very different texts.Baktir does not completely reject Said's argument that European writers created a separate discourse to represent the Orient; rather, he shows us that there was also a dialogic and negotiating tendency which did not make a radical distinction between the East and the West. Relying his argument on 18th century pseudo-oriental letters, oriental tales, and oriental travelogues, Baktir demonstrates that the representation of the Ottoman Orient in 18th century English literature differs essentially from earlier centuries because a developing critical and liberal spirit established a negotiation between the two worlds. In this book, he indicates how the critical and inquisitive spirit of the age of Enlightenment interanimated Oriental and European cultures.