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.

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.

How did romanticism define its relationship with its sources? How has romanticism since been understood and misunderstood across a range of cultural activities? These are among the questions taken up in this reexamination of the place of adaptation within romanticism. Renegotiating the cultural topography of the period and the place of romanticism in subsequent cultural history, the volume focuses on the adaptation of source material by romantic writers and the adaptation in subsequent periods of the tropes and ideologies associated with romanticism. In place of a hierarchical distinction between source and text, between ’romanticism’ and its contexts, the collection identifies distinct but overlapping and mutually constitutive genres such as the Gothic and romance. Whether their essays deal with early nineteenth-century periodical reviews, affordable editions of Pride and Prejudice aimed at the late nineteenth-century mass audience, or the ongoing cultural presence of romanticism in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century debates about embryology and stem cell research, the contributors remain cognizant of the tension between the processes of adaptation and the apparent ideology of romantic originality.

Though writers and readers have long agreed that travel does not only broaden the mind, but that it is also useful to report on such an experience, the question of what to report on and how has remained a matter of debate. To think of travel and travel writing as “foreign correspondence” is to apply, metaphorically, a phrase that has its own complex and overlapping history in journalism, politics, and international culture. The chapters of this volume focus on this notion, seen here as a dual problematic oscillating between the private and the public, whether as letters or other forms of writing sent from abroad. From Mandeville’s notorious Travels to fin de siècle Hispanic writing, this volume offers readings of accounts by early modern and more recent Lithuanian and Polish travellers, representations of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Ottoman Empire and India, Quixotic tropes in English travel writing about Spain, Galignani’s newspaper aesthetics, and several contributions on translation issues and the foreign as an idiom to be rendered in more familiar terms. The essays collected here thus all take foreign correspondence as their starting point, whether as letters or in other narrative forms. These texts are involved in complex webs of personal, political, social, and cultural negotiations between travellers and their hosts, as well as their presumed target audience; a key aspect of the rhetorics of foreign correspondence, as the chapters of this volume also go to show.

Travel narratives and historical works shaped the perception of Muslims and the East in the Victorian and post-Victorian periods. Analyzing the discourses on Muslims which originated in the European Middle Ages, the first part of the book discusses the troubled legacy of the encounters between the East and the West and locates the nineteenth-century texts concerning the Saracens and their lands in the liminal space between history and fiction. Drawing on the nineteenth-century models, the second part of the book looks at fictional and non-fictional works of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century which re-established the "Oriental obsession," stimulating dread and resentment, and even more strongly setting the Civilized West against the Barbaric East. Here medieval metaphorical enemies of Mankind – the World, the Flesh and the Devil – reappear in different contexts: the world of immigration, of white women desiring Muslim men, and the present-day "freedom fighters."

What does it mean for a nation and its citizens to be virtuous? The term "virtue" is ubiquitous in eighteenth-century British literature, but its definition is more often assumed than explained. Bringing together two significant threads of eighteenth-century scholarship—one on republican civic identity and the mythic legacy of the freeborn Briton and the other on how England’s global encounters were shaped by orientalist fantasies— Orienting Virtue examines how England’s sense of collective virtue was inflected and informed by Eastern empires. Bethany Williamson shows how England’s struggle to define and practice national virtue hinged on the difficulty of articulating an absolute concept of moral value amid dynamic global trade networks. As writers framed England’s story of exceptional liberties outside the "rise and fall" narrative they ascribed to other empires, virtue claims encoded anxieties about England’s tenuous position on the global stage, especially in relation to the Ottoman, Mughal, and Far Eastern empires. Tracking valences of virtue across the century’s political crises and diverse literary genres, Williamson demonstrates how writers consistently deployed virtue claims to imagine a "middle way" between conserving ancient ideals and adapting to complex global realities. Orienting Virtue concludes by emphasizing the ongoing urgency, in our own moment, of balancing competing responsibilities and interests as citizens both of nations and of the world.

Who Is a Muslim? argues that modern Urdu literature, from its inception in colonial institutions such as Fort William College, Calcutta, to its dominant iterations in contemporary Pakistan—popular novels, short stories, television serials—is formed around a question that is and historically has been at the core of early modern and modern Western literatures. The question “Who is a Muslim?,” a constant concern within eighteenth-century literary and scholarly orientalist texts, the English oriental tale chief among them, takes on new and dangerous meanings once it travels to the North-Indian colony, and later to the newly formed Pakistan. A literary-historical study spanning some three centuries, this book argues that the idea of an Urdu canon, far from secular or progressive, has been shaped as the authority designate around the intertwined questions of piety, national identity, and citizenship.