Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This volume investigates the reconfigurations of literary traditions coming from Islamicate regions of the world by British orientalists. The book is concerned with the logics of orientalist selection, reconfiguration, and appropriation of Islamicate literary canons, focusing on the period from the endowment of the first Chairs in Arabic at Cambridge and Oxford to the establishment of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta. Contrary to the Saidian premise of an invention of the East by the West, it argues that orientalists did not invent a canon but they transferred and translated texts and authors, which/who were already recognized as canonical across Islamicate literary cultures. The book analyses first the constitution of collections of Arabic, Persian, and Indic manuscripts and their cataloguing in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The second part investigates the variety of linguistic and literary partitioning and assemblage proposed by orientalists and discusses how their classical literary formation underpinned theories and practices of imitation, translation, and writing. The third part examines the editing and translating of Arabic, Persian, and Indic literatures in England and in British colonial India, and in particular the function of specimens and anthologies in the constitution of a corpus of Eastern literatures in English. The book unpacks orientalist genealogies and offers hermeneutical and critical tools to problematize contemporary selections and partitions of literatures in the publishing industry and academic world, and to reflect on the logics of promotion and demotion of specific Arabic, Persian, and Indic texts, genres, styles, and formats.</jats:p>