The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century

Martha Pike Conant's The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century is a pioneering scholarly survey of how Eastern and pseudo-Eastern fiction entered English letters, largely through French mediation, and helped shape the changing tastes of the age. Tracing the subject from medieval legends and Renaissance travel writing to the flowering of eighteenth-century Oriental fiction, she shows how the genre stands between classicism and Romanticism, with the Arabian Nights opening a new world of wonder, danger, and imaginative freedom. Conant treats the collection as a masterpiece of world literature: vivid in its bustling settings, marvels, and dramatic reversals, yet loose in structure and limited in psychological depth. She then follows the genre's English and French developments into satire and philosophical criticism, where works like The Turkish Spy and Thomas Brown's adaptations use the outsider's eye to expose European society. Richly documented with appendices, notes, and bibliography, the study offers a wide-ranging comparative-literature history of a major literary movement. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.