Awards
- Winner of Rose Mary Crawshay Prize 2006.
- Winner of Winner of the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize 2006.
Overview
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. Eighteenth-century readers in the West came to 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 with the 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 oriental territories (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 is structured 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 dominate its 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 its products 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 rather than a confident expression of colonial or imperial ambition.
Full Product Details
Author: Ros Ballaster (Fellow in English Literature, Mansfield College, Oxford University)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 13.70cm
, Height: 2.20cm
, Length: 21.50cm
Weight: 0.529kg
ISBN: 9780199234295
ISBN 10: 0199234299
Pages: 424
Publication Date: 01 November 2007
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: To order
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.
Reviews
Rich and wide-ranging account of Restoration and eighteenth-century fictions of the East... Critically adroit and historically nuanced... brilliant discussions --Tom Keymer<br>
Reveal[s] eighteenth-century scholars' continuing interest in the ways English readers and writers assimilated, re-imagined, and wrote tales from and about the rest of the world. --Elizabeth Wanning Harries, Smith College Rich and wide-ranging account of Restoration and eighteenth-century fictions of the East... Critically adroit and historically nuanced... brilliant discussions --Tom Keymer A very welcome addition to the available scholarship --T.H Barrett, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies Rich and wide-ranging account of Restoration and eighteenth-century fictions of the East... Critically adroit and historically nuanced... brilliant discussions --Tom Keymer A thorough and well-researched work of literary criticism. --The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography
<br> Reveal[s] eighteenth-century scholars' continuing interest in the ways English readers and writers assimilated, re-imagined, and wrote tales from and about the rest of the world. --Elizabeth Wanning Harries, Smith College<p><br> Rich and wide-ranging account of Restoration and eighteenth-century fictions of the East... Critically adroit and historically nuanced... brilliant discussions --Tom Keymer<p><br> A very welcome addition to the available scholarship --T.H Barrett, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies<p><br> Rich and wide-ranging account of Restoration and eighteenth-century fictions of the East... Critically adroit and historically nuanced... brilliant discussions --Tom Keymer<p><br> A thorough and well-researched work of literary criticism. --The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography<p><br>
Review from previous edition a very welcome addition to the available scholarship T.H. Barrett, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies rich and wide-ranging account of Restoration and eighteenth-century fictions of the East... Critically adroit and historically nuanced... brilliant discussions Tom Keymer
Author Information
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.
