Critical Orientalism

Writers working within the realist mode emphasize the difficulties of direct knowledge of foreign lands and peoples. This chapter deals with the metatextual literary theme of reading and writing on the colonies as misguided, textually derivative, or deliberately fraudulent. Realist novels expose misrepresentation through the copying of earlier textual sources and through misguided daydreaming or Exotic Bovarysm. Colonial encounters are also present in framed or embedded tales, whose double narrative status emphasizes the problematic nature of colonial experience and its disjunction from metropolitan life. These various forms of metatextuality are part of a tradition that foregrounds self-conscious critique of colonial representation, or a ‘Critical Orientalism’.

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