“Oriental Gothic: Imperial-Commercial Nightmares from the Eighteenth Century to the Romantic Period”

Originating from the global aspirations of Enlightenment cultural geography, Oriental Gothic paradoxically presents anti-Enlightenment and anti-modern tendencies that throw into relief the unsayable and the repressed in opposition to rationalist notions of self and polity, identity and culture. At the same time, Oriental Gothic was also inextricable from eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century processes of transformation and modernisation based on territorial expansion and commercial imperialism; in particular, pertaining both to archaic, unchangeable Asia and developing, thrusting Europe, trade constitutes an unsettling connection between their would-be opposed temporalities. As this chapter contends, Oriental Gothic constitutes an imaginative site of real and metaphorical exchanges, yoking together the transcendental and the material to bring to the surface Britain’s imperial-commercial fears and anxieties in the last phase of the long eighteenth century.