Reconfiguring and Appropriating Arabic, Persian, and Indic Literary Traditions in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain : Orientalism and the Recreation of the Islamicate Canon

Reconfiguring and Appropriating Arabic, Persian, and Indic Literary Traditions in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain investigates the reconfigurations of literary traditions coming from Islamicate regions of the world by British orientalists.Claire Gallien explores the logics of orientalist selection, reconfiguration, and appropriation of Islamicate literary canons, and focuses on the period going from the endowment of the first chairs in Arabic at Cambridge and Oxford in 1632 and 1636 respectively to the establishment of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta in 1784, presided by Sir William Jones until 1794.Contrary to the Saidian premise of an invention of the East by the West, Gallien argues that orientalists did not invent a canon but they transferred and translated texts and authors, which/who were already recognised as canonical across Islamicate literary cultures.Given the above, the question that preoccupies this book is what happens to the canon when partially re-created an