Narrative Moves

This chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to look at what western readers who imagined themselves into the role of Dinarzade—an observer from the sidelines of the dynamics of an eastern despotism—read into oriental tales, a form of narration that flourished from the late 17th to the late 18th century. The book does not seek exhaustively to catalogue the many, various, and frequently conflicting attitudes of 18th-century western Europeans to contemporary Asian states. Rather, it makes a case that between the late 17th and late 18th centuries, the Orient came to acquire both a loose conceptual unity and internal difference through persistent representation of its spaces and peoples as consumed by and in fiction. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

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