Fabulous orients

the long version

"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." "This is the first book-length study of the oriental tale to appear for almost a century. Informed by recent historiographical and literary reassessments 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."--BOOK JACKET.