ABSTRACT
Southey's East appears to be more that of the scholar and the imperial administrator than that of the artificer. When seen as a compromise between words and things, Southey's East appears as a sprawling textual machine aimed at capturing and reproducing a protean and boundless object. If Southey's Eastern imaginary is a crucial manifestation of a Romantic 'Oriental renaissance' which, in Raymond Schwab's definition, is a primarily philosophical and scholarly enterprise, nonetheless, it cannot be dissociated from the fact that, much like Byron or Moore, Southey perceived the East as a reservoir of stories and objects, and a material-discursive continuum. Bringing together the discourses of the philosopher, the artificer and the jeweller, Southey's Orient is a multiple construction of the Romantic East and a precious record of its intermediate status between commodity and narrative. The danger of being engulfed by the East also besets any critical approach to Southey's hybrid Oriental imaginary.
