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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > 16th to 18th centuries
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Fabulous Orients - Fictions of the East in England 1662-1785 (Paperback)
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Fabulous Orients - Fictions of the East in England 1662-1785 (Paperback)
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Narrative moves. Stories migrate from one culture to another, over
vast distances sometimes, but their path is often difficult to
trace and obscured by time. Fabulous Orients looks at the traffic
of narrative between Orient and Occident in the eighteenth century,
and challenges the assumption that has dominated since the
publication of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) that such traffic
is always one-way. Eighteenth-century readers in the West came to
draw their mental maps of oriental territories and distinctions
between them from their experience of reading tales "from" the
Orient.
In this proto-colonial period the English encounter with the East
was largely mediated through the consumption of material goods such
as silks, indigo, muslin, spices, or jewels, imported from the
East, together with the more "moral" traffic of narratives about
the East, both imaginary and ethnographic. Through analyses of
fictional representations (including travellers' accounts, letter
narratives such as Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, and popular
sequences of tales such as the Arabian Nights Entertainments) of
four oriental territories (Persia, Turkey, China and India), Ros
Ballaster demonstrates the ways in which the East came to be
understood as a source of story, a territory of fable and
narrative.
Fabulous Orients is structured according to territory rather than
genre. Each section opens by re-narrating an oriental story in
which a feminine character serves to "figure" western desire for
the territory she represents: the courtesan queen of the Ottoman
seraglio Roxolana; the riddling Chinese princess Turandocte; and
the illusory sati of India, Canzade. The book goes on to explore
the range offabulous writings relating to each territory in order
to illustrate how certain narrative tropes can come to dominate its
representation: the conflict between the male look and female
speech staged in the seraglio in the case of Turkey and Persia, the
inauthenticity and/or dullness associated with China and its
products such as porcelain, and the illusory dreams that are woven
in the space of India and associated with its textile industries.
This is the first book-length study of the oriental tale to appear
for almost a century. Informed by recent historiographical and
literary re-assessments of western constructions of the East, it
develops an original argument about the use of narrative as a form
of sympathetic and imaginative engagement with otherness, a
disinvestment of the self rather than a confident expression of
colonial or imperial ambition.
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