Most relevant for the study of social cognition and affect is how the imagination estranges the self, as elucidated in Romanticism and Consciousness. In Romantic literature, the introspective subject overcomes solipsism by identifying with the stranger within, a psychic alienation that helped forge a common national culture. Hospitality is put to the test in terms of what Julia Kristeva conceives as global modernity's socio-psychological imperative: to live with others is to live as others. To illustrate this self-othering, my chapter examines the panorama of Constantinople painted by Henry Aston Barker (1774–1856) on site in 1800. His Constantinople from the Tower of Galata and Constantinople from the Tower of Leander compliment one other as Europe and Asia, respectively. The first view was reproduced in 1813 as colored aquatints in eight plates (Barker, A Series; see https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-romanticism-and-consciousness-revisited.html). The original paintings (now lost) appeared on a 10,000-square-foot cylindrical canvas hung inside a rotunda in London's Leicester Square, immersing the Muslim nobleman Mirza Abu Talib Khan Isfahani (1752–1806) in a 360-degree simulacrum. He left Calcutta for London in 1799 and returned to his hometown, Lucknow, via Constantinople during the Peace of Amiens in 1802, as commemorated in his exuberant Persian poetry about Barker's life-like artwork. In the poet's eyes, panoramic Constantinople epitomizes the divine mandate to welcome strangers. This vision of peace, I argue, is intrinsic to a metropolitan self-consciousness oriented toward Islamic–Ottoman understandings of social relationality.

Reorienting England through this visual modality brings home the exotic Orient as imagined by Europeans. The knowledge–power nexus that Edward Said dates to the Napoleonic occupation of Ottoman Egypt and Syria in 1798–1801 was to institutionalize what Raymond Schwab dubs the ‘Oriental Renaissance’: when English and French philologists discovered Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian classical texts as crucial to Europe's cultural revivification as were the Greek and Latin classics discovered by their Italian predecessors three centuries prior. This second rebirth sparked European enthusiasm for an India dominated by the British, as expressed by Friedrich Schlegel in 1800. His often-quoted dictum that ‘we must seek the supreme romanticism in the Orient’ led M. H. Abrams to conclude, before Schwab did, that orientalist philology had incubated a Romantic lyric consciousness (qtd in Schwab 13).