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New chronology and further reading; Tony Tanner's original introduction reinstated

Edited with an introduction by Ros Ballaster .
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Though not the first novel she wrote, Sense and Sensibility was the first Jane Austen published Though she initially called it Elinor and Marianne, Austen jettisoned both the title and the epistolary mode in which it was originally written, but kept the essential theme: the necessity of finding a workable middle ground between passion and reason. The story revolves around the Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne. Whereas the former is a sensible, rational creature, her younger sister is wildly romantic--a characteristic that offers Austen plenty of scope for both satire and compassion. Commenting on Edward Ferrars, a potential suitor for Elinor's hand, Marianne admits that while she "loves him tenderly," she finds him disappointing as a possible lover for her sister:

Oh! Mama, how spiritless, how tame was Edward's manner in reading to us last night! I felt for my sister most severely. Yet she bore it with so much composure, she seemed scarcely to notice it. I could hardly keep my seat. To hear those beautiful lines which have frequently almost driven me wild, pronounced with such impenetrable calmness, such dreadful indifference!

Soon however, Marianne meets a man who measures up to her ideal: Mr. Willoughby, a new neighbor. So swept away by passion is Marianne that her behavior begins to border on the scandalous. Then Willoughby abandons her; meanwhile, Elinor's growing affection for Edward suffers a check when he admits he is secretly engaged to a childhood sweetheart. How each of the sisters reacts to their romantic misfortunes, and the lessons they draw before coming finally to the requisite happy ending forms the heart of the novel. Though Marianne's disregard for social conventions and willingness to consider the world well-lost for love may appeal to modern readers, it is Elinor whom Austen herself most evidently admired; a truly happy marriage, she shows us, exists only where sense and sensibility meet and mix in proper measure. --Alix Wilber.
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Narrative moves. Stories migrate from one culture to another, over vast distances sometimes, but their path is often difficult to trace and obscured by time. Fabulous Orients looks at the traffic of narrative between Orient and Occident in the eighteenth century, and challenges the assumption
that has dominated since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) that such traffic is always one-way. Eighteenth-century readers in the West came to draw their mental maps of oriental territories and distinctions between them from their experience of reading tales "from" the Orient.

In this proto-colonial period the English encounter with the East was largely mediated through the consumption of material goods such as silks, indigo, muslin, spices, or jewels, imported from the East, together with the more "moral" traffic of narratives about the East, both imaginary and
ethnographic. Through analyses of fictional representations (including travelers' accounts, letter narratives such as Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, and popular sequences of tales such as the Arabian Nights Entertainments) of four oriental territories (Persia, Turkey, China and India), Ros Ballaster
demonstrates the ways in which the East came to be understood as a source of story, a territory of fable and narrative.

Fabulous Orients is structured according to territory rather than genre. Each section opens by re-narrating an oriental story in which a feminine character serves to "figure" western desire for the territory she represents: the courtesan queen of the Ottoman seraglio Roxolana; the riddling Chinese
princess Turandocte; and the illusory sati of India, Canzade. The book goes on to explore the range of fabulous writings relating to each territory in order to illustrate how certain narrative tropes can come to dominate its representation: the conflict between the male look and female speech staged
in the seraglio in the case of Turkey and Persia, the inauthenticity and/or dullness associated with China and its products such as porcelain, and the illusory dreams that are woven in the space of India and associated with its textile industries.

This is the first book-length study of the oriental tale to appear for almost a century. Informed by recent historiographical and literary re-assessments of western constructions of the East, it develops an original argument about the use of narrative as a form of sympathetic and imaginative
engagement with otherness, a disinvestment of the self rather than a confident expression of colonial or imperial ambition..
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Fables of the East is the first anthology to provide textual examples of representations of oriental cultures in the early modern period drawn from a variety of genres: travel writing, histories, and fiction. Organized according to genre in order to illustrate the diverse shapes the oriental
tale adopted in the period, the extracts cover the popular sequence of oriental tales, the pseudo-oriental tale, travels and history, and letter fictions. Authors represented range from the familiar--Joseph Addison, Horace Walpole, Montesquieu, Oliver Goldsmith--to authors of great popularity in
their own time who have since faded in reputation such as James Ridley, Alexander Dow, and Eliza Haywood.

The selection has been devised to call attention to the diversity in the ways that different oriental cultures are represented to English readers. Readers of this anthology will be able to identify a contrast between the luxury, excess, and sexuality associated with Islamic Turkey, Persia, and
Mughal India and the wisdom, restraint, and authority invested in Brahmin India and Confucian China. Fables of the East redraws the cultural map we have inherited of the eighteenth century, demonstrating contemporary interest in gentile and "idolatrous" religions, in Confucianism and Buddhism
especially, and that the construction of the Orient in the western imagination was not exclusively one of an Islamic Near and Middle East.

Ros Ballster's introduction addresses the importance of the idea of "fable" to traditions of narrative and representations of the East. Each text is accompanied by explanatory head and footnotes, also provided is a glossary of oriental terms and places that were familiar to the texts'
eighteenth-century readers..
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Ballaster reviews Incest and the English Novel, 1684-1814 by Ellen Pollak.

This digital document is an article from Clio, most recently published by ProQuest Information and Learning on September 30, 2005. The length of the article is 2427 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Incest and the English Novel, 1684-1814
Author: Ros Ballaster
Publication:Clio (Book Review-Favorable)
Date: September 30, 2005
Publisher: ProQuest Information and Learning
Volume: 34 Issue: 4 Page: 480-486,513

Distributed by ProQuest Information and Learning.
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