Oriental fiction

In 1908, Martha Pike Conant commented that: “Historians of English fiction have insufficiently recognized the fact that the oriental tale was one of the forms of literature that gave to the reading public in Augustan England the element of plot which, to a certain extent, supplemented that of character.” In a consideration of the contribution of “oriental” or “pseudo-oriental” sources to the development of the novel in Britain, we can also move beyond Conant’s simple understanding of these texts as a rich source of plot, to a broader consideration of the way fiction came to be conceptualised in the period: as a kind of fabricated import, a hybrid construction similar to other commodities in demand and imported from the Orient in the period such as Indian muslin or Chinese porcelain. Read more