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The introduction begins with a methodological critique of conventional “rise of the novel” narratives, in which individual, carefully chosen texts are taken as symptoms of underlying changes summed up by the word modernity. The potential benefits of quantitative sampling are then described and situated with respect to the computational text analysis more common in the Digital Humanities. Quantitative study reveals trends that can best be understood through an approach adapted from Science and Technology Studies, where new artifacts are the result of an interplay between human values and the material constraints placed on human actors by extant artifacts. The basic problem of the novel’s so-called fictionalization over the course of the eighteenth century is then shown to be bound up with subject matter (notably the use of “nobody” protagonists) and more properly formal issues (involving especially first-person narratives).

Enlightenment Orientalism rewrites the history of the novel by restoring consideration of a range of texts (and overlooked aspects of oft-read works) systematically excluded because they failed to fit existing notions of domestic realism. Aravamudan anchors his alternative genealogy in more capacious conceptions of the novel and inverts the usual understanding of Orientalism as restrictive stereotype to instead ask why Orientalism was so productive of cultural products in European literature. The subgenre of enlightenment Orientalism evinces a heteroglossia that exceeds national realism, and recuperating this broader fictional landscape allows readers to recognize a range of texts otherwise taken to be strange because it falls between genres (transgeneric) or between national spaces (intercultural). Taking the novel to be a cultural transportation device, Aravamudan describes this broader fictional ensemble as an investigative tool that is an alternative to the nation-centered novel after the mid-eighteenth century.

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Introduction

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At the Gates of Realism

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Introduction

Summary

At the Gates of Realism