ABSTRACT
The introduction displaces the central role Edward Said’s seminal 1978 study Orientalism has long occupied for studies of the West’s imaginative engagement of the East in favor of newer approaches, such as Srinivas Aravamudan’s Enlightenment Orientalism (2011). In these more recent critical works, the enthusiastic conceptualizations of the East in eighteenth-century European culture and literature are examined as helping to construct, but also challenge, developing notions of Western modernity. Adapting such an approach for the period in which America experienced a first major wave of interest in the genre, the introduction sketches out how Americans’ imaginations in such texts might be read as responding to an influx of power and wealth that seemed to them something out of a legendary East. These developments, in turn, reshaped basic concepts of self and nation during the era. Americans’ energy-enriched engagement in a growing consumerism required the adoption of more extreme notions of individualism often conceptualized as a religious conversion or apostasy, while the growing wealth of the nation was tied to prophetic ideas of its ascendency, expressed through such ideas as translatio imperii and studii, whereby America was fated to inherit the grandeur of the East.
