The Islamic Orient studies the travel accounts of four British travelers during the nineteenth century. Through a critical analysis of these works, the author examines and questions Edward Said’s concept of "Orientalism" and "Orientalist" discourse: his argument that the orientalist view had such a strong influence on westerners that they invariably perceived the orient through the lens of orientalism. On the contrary, the author argues, no single factor had an overwhelming influence on them. She shows that westerners often struggled with their own conceptions of the orient, and being away for long periods from their homelands, were in fact able to stand between cultures and view them both as insiders and outsiders.

The literary devices used to examine these writings are structure, characterization, satire, landscape description, and word choice, as also the social and political milieu of the writers. The major influences in the author’s analysis are Said, Foucault, Abdel-Malek and Marie Louise Pratt.

Vladimir Biti is Chair Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna. He is the author of eleven books, with Tracing Global Democracy: Literature, Theory, and the Politics of Trauma, 2016 (second, paperback edition 2017), Attached to Dispossession: Sacrificial Narratives in Post-imperial Europe, 2018, and Post-imperial Literature: Translatio Imperii in Kafka and Coetzee, 2022 (paperback edition forthcoming) among the most recent. He is the editor of the volumes Reexamining the National-Philological Legacy: Quest for a New Paradigm, 2014, Claiming the Dispossession: The Politics of Hi/storytelling in Post-imperial Europe, 2017, and co-editor of The Idea of Europe: The Clash of Projections, 2021. He is co-editor of Arcadia: Journal of Literary Culture and Honorary President of the ICLA Committee on Literary Theory. From 2016 to 2022, he has been the Chair of the Academy of Europe’s Literary and Theatrical Section.