Eastern Others on Western Pages: Eighteenth-Century Literary Orientalism

Abstract

Literary orientalism is construed in myriad ways, and focusing on its eighteenth-century manifestations hardly limits the range of interpretations. Here it is understood in terms of the representational practices and motivations inhering in European-authored texts treating cultures to the east of Europe. The epistemological aftermath of the age of exploration, galvanized by the will to global commerce, put an unprecedented number of Turkish, Persian, Arab, Indian, Tartar, Chinese, Japanese and other personages on the pages of erudite and popular literature. Current criticism of these works pivots largely on Said's influential study Orientalism, concomitant with its many mediations by scholars investigating orientalism's intersections with imperialism, feminism, postcolonialism, and other ideological stances. The implications of nationalism and colonialism for eighteenth-century representations of Asian peoples vary considerably, depending on whether one believes that portrayals of eastern others in this period were as yet unsullied, and even benign, or, conversely, that these elaborations exploited their subjects as intensely and perniciously as did their nineteenth-century counterparts. In either case, critics focus on the instrumentalization of the eastern other in the cultural work of the European. British and French texts still inspire the majority of studies. More and more, however, analyses of eighteenth-century German, Russian, Italian, and Spanish writings accompany them. The scholarly fields most fecund for orientalist investigations include theatre, both spoken and musical, translation studies, women's and gender studies, and travel literature.