Abstract

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;This inquiry investigates the adequacy of Marxist and non-Marxist approaches to the 'Other' of Europe in Western thought and literature. The limitations of such approaches to the precolonial and colonial 'Other' derive partly from the reduction of its representations in Western literature to a misrepresentation, whether such misrepresentation is seen to be co-extensive with the mimetic nature of representation in literature, the tropological nature of language, the ideological nature of art, or is itself seen to be expressive of political hegemony. My own approach draws instead on the work of Michel Foucault, deploying the concept of archaeology to reconstruct the genealogy of the Orient in Western literature. The 'Other' of Europe in Western literature has its own genealogy and history which is not to be equated with the history of imperialist capitalism, or deduced from Orientalism as a form of political hegemony. Through a critical assessment of the geneaology of the Islamic Orient in eighteenth and nineteenth century English literature, my inquiry goes on to identify the political value of aesthetic and imaginative appropriations of the Orient, not in imaginative forms of cultural production per se, but in narrative investments of fictions with factuality. The politically and culturally domesticating character of the Orient, in both imaginative and realistic forms of Western literature, is exemplified in the transvaluation of the fictions of the 'Thousand and One Nights' into narrative paradigms in which they acquired a geographical and then an historical Reality, and in the genealogy of the 'strangeness' of the Orient from the 'exotic' and 'Romantic' Orient to the 'unchanging East' between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although there are counter-hegemonic instances in eighteenth and nineteenth century Orientalism, the political nature of aesthetic appropriations of the Orient cannot be defined in isolation from the genealogy of the Orient in such literature