In this ambitious volume, Yunfei Bai delves into the creative adaptations of classical Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan literary texts by four renowned nineteenth- and early twentieth-century authors in France and Argentina: Theophile Gautier, Stephane Mallarme, Victor Segalen, and Jorge Luis Borges. Without any knowledge of the source languages, the authors crafted their own French and Spanish retellings based on received translations of these Asian works. Rewriting the Orient not only explores the so far untapped translation-rewriting continuum to trace the pivotal role of Orientalism in the formation of a singular corpus of world literature that goes beyond the Anglophone canon, but also sheds light on a wide range of innovative discursive strategies that readily challenge traditional notions of cultural appropriation.

No work revealed more of the mysterious East to statesmen, explorers, readers, and writers of the late Middle Ages than the Book of John Mandeville. One of the most widely circulated documents of its day, it first appeared in French between 1356 and 1371 and was soon translated into nine other European languages. Ostensibly the account of one English knight's journeys through Africa and Asia, it is, rather, a compilation of travel writings first shaped by an unknown redactor. Writing East is a study of how Mandeville's Travels came to appear in its various versions, explaining how it went through a series of transformations as it reached new audiences in order to serve as both a response to previous writings about the East and an important voice in the medieval conversation about the nature and limits of the world. Higgins offers a palimpsestic reading of this "multi-text" that demonstrates not only how the original French author overwrote his precursors but also how subsequent translators molded the material to serve their own ideological agendas.

Uncovers the roots of Americans' construction of the "Orient" by examining the work of nineteenth-century authors

Nagai Kafū (1879–1959) spent more time abroad than any other writer of his generation, firing the Japanese imagination with his visions of America and France. Applying the theoretical framework of Occidentalism to Japanese literature, Rachael Hutchinson explores Kafū's construction of the Western Other, an integral part of his critique of Meiji civilization. Through contrast with the Western Other, Kafū was able to solve the dilemma that so plagued Japanese intellectuals—how to modernize and yet retain an authentic Japanese identity in the modern world. Kafū's flexible positioning of imagined spaces like the "West" and the "Orient" ultimately led him to a definition of the Japanese Self. Hutchinson analyzes the wide range of Kafū's work, particularly those novels and stories reflecting Kafū's time in the West and the return to Japan, most unknown to Western readers and a number unavailable in English, along with his better-known depictions of Edo's demimonde. Kafū's place in Japan's intellectual history and his influence on other writers are also discussed.

In Belated Travelers, Ali Behdad offers a compelling cultural critique of nineteenth-century travel writing and its dynamic function in European colonialism. Arriving too late to the Orient, at a time when tourism and colonialism had already turned the exotic into the familiar, late nineteenth-century European travelers to the Middle East experienced a sense of belatedness, of having missed the authentic experience once offered by a world that was already disappearing. Behdad argues that this nostalgic desire for the other contains an implicit critique of Western superiority, a split within European discourses of otherness. Working from these insights and using analyses of power derived from Foucault, Behdad engages in a new critique of orientalism. No longer viewed as a coherent and unified phenomenon or a single developmental tradition, it is seen as a complex and shifting field of practices that has relied upon its own ambivalence and moments of discontinuity to ensure and maintain its power as a discourse of dominance. Through readings of Flaubert, Nerval, Kipling, Blunt, and Eberhardt, and following the transition in travel literature from travelog to tourist guide, Belated Travelers addresses the specific historical conditions of late nineteenth-century orientalism implicated in the discourses of desire and power. Behdad also views a broad range of issues in addition to nostalgia and tourism, including transvestism and melancholia, to specifically demonstrate the ways in which the heterogeneity of orientalism and the plurality of its practice is an enabling force in the production and transformation of colonial power. An exceptional work that provides an important critique of issues at the forefront of critical practice today, Belated Travelers will be eagerly awaited by specialists in nineteenth-century British and French literatures, and all concerned with colonial and post-colonial discourse.

The "margins" in Petra Fachinger's work are occupied largely by second-generation migrant writers from Spain, Italy, and Turkey, German Jewish writers of diverse ethnic origins, and writers born in the GDR. She demonstrates that during the 1980s and 1990s writers from various cultural backgrounds engaged in oppositional discourse to construct their own version of Germany and write back to the German canon. While most studies of texts by minority writers in Germany favour content over form, Fachinger focuses on identifying counter-discursive strategies, and applies postcolonial theory concerned with textual resistance to the German situation. In doing so, this study effectively relates marginal writing in Germany to similar forms of writing in other national and cultural contexts. The oppositional impulse, whether manifested in counter-canonical discourse, postcolonial picaresque, hybridity, rewriting of genre, or grotesque realism, is prompted by the exclusionary politics of the dominant culture. The discursive strategies used by the authors discussed to rewrite Germany expose the assumptions that underlie German public discourse and destabilise notions of Germanness, Jewishness, and Turkishness. Fachinger's reading of texts by marginal writers in Germany, all of whom endeavour to resist marginalisation while simultaneously experiencing or even celebrating the margin as a site of empowerment, was motivated by the absence of comparative studies of such writing. Rewriting Germany from the Margins demonstrates the necessity and usefulness of comparative approaches to minority discourses across national and cultural borders.

Examines the presence of Arabs and the Arab world in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Argentine literature by juxtaposing works by Argentines of European descent and those written by Arab immigrants in Argentina. Between Argentines and Arabs is a groundbreaking contribution to two growing fields: the study of immigrants and minorities in Latin America and the study of the Arab diaspora. As a literary and cultural study, this book examines the textual dialogue between Argentines of European descent and Arab immigrants to Argentina from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s. Using methods drawn from literary analysis and cultural studies, Christina Civantos shows that the Arab presence is twofold: “the Arab” and “the Orient” are an imagined figure and space within the texts produced by Euro-Argentine intellectuals; and immigrants from the Arab world are an actual community, producing their own texts within the multiethnic Argentine nation. This book is both a literary history—of Argentine Orientalist literature and Arab-Argentine immigrant literature—and a critical analysis of how the formation of identities in these two bodies of work is interconnected. Christina Civantos is Assistant Professor of Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami.