Critical Terrains; Contents; Preface; 1 Discourse and Heterogeneity: Situating Orientalism; 2 Travel Narratives and Orientalism: Montagu and Montesquieu; 3 Orient as Woman, Orientalism as Sentimentalism: Flaubert; 4 Orientalism as Literary Criticism: The Reception of E.M. Forster's Passage to India; 5 The Desires of Postcolonial Orientalism: Chinese Utopias of Kristeva, Barthes, and Tel quel; Conclusion: Orientalism Interrupted; Works Cited; Index
Summary
Examining and historicizing the concept of "otherness" in both literature and criticism, Lisa Lowe explores representations of non-European cultures in British and French writings from the eighteenth through the twentieth century. Lowe traces the intersections of culture, class, and sexuality in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters and Montesquieu's Lettres persanes and discusses tropes of orientalism, racialism, and romanticism in Flaubert. She then turns to debates in Anglo-American and Indian criticism on Forster's Passage to India and on the utopian projection of China in the poststructuralist theories of Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes and in the journal Tel Quel