Orientalism and Literature

Sinopse

"Introduction What is the relationship between Orientalism and literature and how does it aid us in our reading? Orientalism: Critical Concepts sets out to interrogate a key critical concept in literary studies, and has the aim of reviewing the evolution of the concept as it has been explored, imagined and narrated in literature. Building upon existing scholarship the aim is to give readers a comprehensive grasp of the origins and present contours of Orientalism, and to point out future directions in this field. In the early eighteenth century the term designated scholarship on the East, as well as a style in the arts. Interest in the study of oriental languages led to the establishment of Orientalism as a profession. Although it continued as a discipline for well over two centuries, its scope developed beyond its philological beginnings and its vaguely defined existence as a literary or artistic topic or style. Then, in the 1960s and 70s, the academic credibility of Orientalism as an institutionalized discipline began to be contested, and after Edward Said's epoch-making volume, Orientalism: Western Perceptions of the Orient (1978), the term underwent wholesale re-evaluation. From a literary studies perspective the value of Said's work is that it probes foundations of the relationship between the West and its other in the context of the creation of the modern world, as seen through the lens of culture and literature. Said focused on Orientalism in Britain and France, and in the United States from the second half of the twentieth century"--