ABSTRACT
This chapter considers some links between fairy tales and Orientalism. It starts by analyzing the ways that early European writers and artists extracted, appropriated, and transcribed/translated Oriental narratives, reformulating them to complement Western ideologies and social and political contexts. Particular attention is paid to the many stories making up “1001 Nights”—including the Disney adaptation of “Aladdin” for the 1992 film. The second part of the chapter focuses on how the Orient is represented in Western texts and the stereotypes and assumptions that go into those images. Here, the analysis draws on Hans Christian Andersen’s Orientalist creation “The Nightingale” (1844), as well as the illustrations that accompanied its various reproductions. The chapter concludes by considering how the Orient has become a paradox for Western authors and audiences: at once contained as antiquated or pre-modern, uncivilized, archaic, and hypertechnological, cyborgian, and dangerously unnatural. This paradox is represented in “The Nightingale” through the trope of techno-orientalism.
