As a cultural antithesis, the Orient is a site of projections for European mind-sets and fantasies. Since the 19th century, it has been an omnipresent subject, particularly in francophone literature and art. The contributions to this volume uncover these constructions of the Orient in their complementarity and their different manifestations in visual art and literature. As an interdisciplinary contribution to the orientalism debate, the literary and artistic works of so-called orientalism are no longer subjected to a stock critique of ideology through scholarship. Rather, we are shown that many of these books are already engaged in the act of deconstructing the Orient as an aesthetic practice.
