Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel

by Srinivas Aravamudan

Srinivas Aravamudan here reveals how Oriental tales, pseudo-ethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political satires took Europe by storm during the eighteenth century. Naming this body of fiction Enlightenment Orientalism, he poses a range of urgent questions that uncovers the interdependence of Oriental tales and domestic fiction, thereby challenging standard scholarly narratives about the rise of the novel.
More than mere exoticism, Oriental tales fascinated ordinary readers as well as intellectuals, taking the fancy of philosophers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot in France, and writers such as Defoe, Swift, and Goldsmith in Britain. Aravamudan shows that Enlightenment Orientalism was a significant movement that criticized irrational European practices even while sympathetically bridging differences among civilizations. A sophisticated reinterpretation of the history of the novel, Enlightenment Orientalism is sure to be welcomed as a landmark work in eighteenth-century studies.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

360 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[David Willey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read through the first part and skimmed the second part. At times this was a very helpful corrective to Said's more 19th-century-focused reading of orientalism. Ultimately though, I didn't find this book convincing. His reading of the Enlightenment needed more time to breathe, and this could have partly been a function of Aravamudan trying to answer three questions simultaneously (what is enlightenment? what is orientalism? what is the significance of the 18 c realist novel?). I also didn't enjoy his writing style, which was jargony in an early-2000s, high theory sort of way, and which made it at times unnecessarily difficult to follow his argument.