Eighteenth‐Century Orientalism in Contemporary British Historiography and Literary Criticism

Abstract

To speak about orientalism now is to explain the persistent concern, among academic and non‐academic readers and writers alike, with the transformative effect of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978). Said's text has been taken as a challenge by historians of society and of literature alike. To these scholars, the book offered a vast new field of inquiry into the relationship between European and colonial history, between cultural production and capitalism, and between Enlightenment idealism and the politics of domination. Orientalism was also a particular model of interpretive methodology, which repurposed Orientalism, once a term for cultural appreciation and interest, to name a relationship of mistrust, abuse, and control. We show in this essay that Said's argument about the inextricable ties between Europe and its colonial domains has been so deeply absorbed as an intellectual, ethical, and political imperative that no serious scholarship is now imaginable that remains unaware of imperialism as a formative element of European history and culture. As a model of interpretive methodology, Said's work has been subjected to some of the most poignant and compelling criticisms, especially by contemporary British historiography and literary criticism working on the eighteenth‐century period and whose purpose and effect have been to expand and improve the examination and understanding of imperialism and the enduring practices and implications of imperial culture. What has perplexed eighteenth‐century scholars and then encouraged them to take up the question of Orientalism was the fact that Said largely omitted periods prior to Bonaparte's expedition in Egypt in 1798 and provided a monolithic and hegemonic version of Orientalism as discursive formation, transportable and translatable to any given time and place. Scholars of the eighteenth‐century period, and more particularly, given the scope of Said's research, those working in the fields of the history of empire and in literary criticism, have been keen to respond to the Orientalist challenge. This allowed them not only to embrace the Saidian perspective and revisit the corpus of eighteenth‐century literature through the Orientalist prism but also, at a second stage perhaps, to refine and adapt the concept of Orientalism to time and place specifics and display a more anxious history of empire. The re‐reading of European textual materials with an eye to Orientalism has been (and continues to be) enabling of historicist understandings of literary representation and its potentially collusive relationship with the histories of colonialism. Developments in colonial historiography and related fields such as historical anthropology have made possible new insights into the relationship between eighteenth‐century English literature and empire. Orientalism also provided an analytical frame to think about matters related to the construction of tropes, the transformation of Eastern texts as they traveled across countries and continents, the promotion and demotion of genres, ...