SOURCE: "Nationalism and Exoticism: Nineteenth-Century Others in Flaubert's Salammbô and L'Education sentimentale" in Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism, edited by Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991, pp. 213-42.

In the following essay, Lowe discusses "the French tradition of orientalism " and the treatment of "otherness" in Flaubert's works. Lowe argues that "Flaubert's corpus, considered as a series of orien-talist moments, reflects the divided and conflicted nature of nineteenth-century French culture itself.''

Orientalist Text as Cultural Artifact

The necessarily diverse ways in which we construct and approximate the "macropolitical" field in nineteenth-century studies vary not only according to the national culture through which one approaches the field, but certainly also according to the nature of the materials through which one reads, reconstitutes, and perhaps, invents the "macropolitical"—whether they be historical, literary, or para-literary materials. The "macropolitical" can be extrapolated then as a...