Fabulous orients : fictions of the East in England, 1662-1785 / Ros Ballaster.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ballaster, Rosalind.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--Asian influences.

English literature.

English literature--18th century--History and criticism.

English literature--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism.

Middle East--In literature.

Middle East.

Orientalism in literature.

Exoticism in literature.

Orient--In literature.

Orient.

Draper.

Asia--In literature.

Asia.

Middle East Region.

Physical Description:

xiii, 408 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2005.

Summary:

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.

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, together with the more 'moral' traffic of narratives about the East, both imaginary and ethnographic. Structured by territory - Persia, Turkey, China, and India - rather than genre, Ros Ballaster's analyses of fictional representations (including travellers' accounts, letter-narratives, and popular sequences of tales such as the Arabian Nights' Entertainments) demonstrate the ways in which the East came to be understood as a source of story, a territory of fable and narrative.

Each section opens by renarrating 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 of fabulous writings relating to each territory, illustrating how certain narrative tropes came to dominate its representation: the conflict between the male look and female speech staged in the Turkish and Persian seraglio, the inauthenticity and/or dullness associated with China and its products such as porcelain, and the illusory dreams 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.

Contents:

1 Narrative Moves 1

Dinarzade, the second string 1

The state of narrative 7

2 Shape-Shifting: Oriental Tales 25

Fadlallah and Zemroude: transmigratory desires 25

The framed sequence 32

Travellers' tales 36

Fictional letters 41

Histories 45

Heroic drama 52

A passion for tales 57

3 Tales of the Seraglio: Turkey and Persia 59

Roxolana: the loquacious courtesan 59

Speaking likenesses: Turkey and Persia 70

Loquacious women I Staging the Orient 83

Loquacious women II Narrating the Orient 95

Speculative men I Spies and correspondents 145

Speculative men II Court secrets 171

'Fabulous and Romantic': the 'Embassy Letters' and 'The Sultan's Tale' 179

4 'Bearing Confucius' Morals to Britannia's Ears': China 193

Tourandocte, the riddling princess 193

Chinese whispers 202

Orphans and absolutism: tragedies of state 208

Empire of Dulness 218

Narrative transmigrations 227

Chinese letters of reason 242

Madness and civilization 252

5 'Dreams of Men Awake': India 254

Canzade: the illusory sati 254

India as Illusion 263

'The dreaming Priest': Aureng-Zebe 275

The treasures of the East: Indian tales 292

Tales of India: weaving illusions 295

The Indian fable: rational animals 343

Waking from the dream 358

6 Epilogue: Romantic Revisions of the Orient 360.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 376-392) and index.

ISBN:

0199267332

OCLC:

60837766

Publisher Number:

9780199267330

9780199267990 (acid-free paper)