Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662-1785 by Ros Ballaster (En

Description: Fabulous Orients by Ros Ballaster Estimated delivery 3-12 business days Format Paperback Condition Brand New Description The first book-length study of the oriental tale in England since 1908, Fabulous Orients is an original work of criticism which illustrates the centrality of narratives of and from the eastern territories of Turkey, Persia, China, and India in the formation of the novel and constructions of western identity in a culture on the threshold of empire. Publisher Description 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 Saids Orientalism (1978) that such traffic is always one-way. Eighteenth-century readers in the West cameto 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 withthe 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 orientalterritories (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 isstructured 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 of fabulous writings relating to each territory in order to illustrate how certain narrative tropes can come to dominateits 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 itsproducts 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 ratherthan a confident expression of colonial or imperial ambition. Author Biography Born in Bombay, India, in 1962, Ros Ballaster has had an abiding interest in eastern culture and narrative. She was a visiting Fellow at Harvard University 1988-89; Lecturer in English Literature at University of East Anglia 1989-1993; and Leverhulme Major Research Fellow 2000-2003. She is currently College and University Fellow in English Literature at Mansfield College, Oxford. Details ISBN 0199234299 ISBN-13 9780199234295 Title Fabulous Orients Author Ros Ballaster Format Paperback Year 2007 Pages 424 Publisher Oxford University Press GE_Item_ID:137015710; About Us Grand Eagle Retail is the ideal place for all your shopping needs! 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