At the Gates of Realism

Abstract

Enlightenment Orientalism rewrites the history of the novel by restoring consideration of a range of texts (and overlooked aspects of oft-read works) systematically excluded because they failed to fit existing notions of domestic realism. Aravamudan anchors his alternative genealogy in more capacious conceptions of the novel and inverts the usual understanding of Orientalism as restrictive stereotype to instead ask why Orientalism was so productive of cultural products in European literature. The subgenre of enlightenment Orientalism evinces a heteroglossia that exceeds national realism, and recuperating this broader fictional landscape allows readers to recognize a range of texts otherwise taken to be strange because it falls between genres (transgeneric) or between national spaces (intercultural). Taking the novel to be a cultural transportation device, Aravamudan describes this broader fictional ensemble as an investigative tool that is an alternative to the nation-centered novel after the mid-eighteenth century.