Abstract
[First Paragraph]
Although imaginary travelers and voyages date back at least as far as the
work of Lucian, the figure of the fictional oriental traveler seems to belong
primarily to the eighteenth century. Following the great success of Giovanni
Marana’s Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, first published in Paris in 1684,
a wide range of European writers sought to exploit the various satiric and
comic possibilities that were offered by Eastern spies and observers. While
a work such as George Lyttelton’s Letters from a Persian in England (1734)
was clearly informed by a specific anti-Walpole agenda, fictional orientals
in early-eighteenth-century British writing, especially, seem above all
to have offered another means of addressing the experience of modernity:
figures such as the Indian in Tom Brown’s Amusements Serious and Comical
(1702) or the Ambassadors of Bantam in Spectator 557 (1712) are presented as
newcomers to London, and shown to be both fascinated and perplexed by
the workings of commercial society. In many ways, then, the oriental traveler
performs more or less the same function as a range of other eighteenthcentury
spies and observers, by offering positions — albeit provisional and
ironic — from which to view the customs and manners of modern Britain.
Oliver Goldsmith’s Chinese philosopher, Lien Chi Altangi, stands out
from the crowd of such fictional informants, however, both because he is
made to play a larger role than this, and because he serves as more than just
an estranging device. Although Lien Chi frequently misreads situations
and gets things wrong, he describes himself as one who seeks “to know the men of every country,” and he advances the claims of a “cosmopolitan” orientation
that Goldsmith’s other writings of the late 1750s and early 1760s
take very seriously. But while The Citizen of the World attempts to hold on
to a utopian sense of global community, it offers a number of interrogative
and even antagonistic perspectives on the idea of the cosmopolitan, too,
often rehearsing the terms of current debates. Although Goldsmith arguably
took the fiction of the oriental traveler further than any of his contemporaries,
therefore, his work might also be seen to offer a critical reflection
on such figures, and to anticipate the slow demise of this genre in the later
decades of the eighteenth century. Continues..
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 56-75 |
Number of pages | 20 |
Journal | Eighteenth-Century Life |
Volume | 30 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2006 |