English Orientalist travel writing lacked the self-conscious craft of French counterparts

Evidence

Thus whenever the Oriental motif for the English writer was not principally a stylistic matter (as in FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát or in Morier’s Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan), it forced him to confront a set of imposing resistances to his individual fantasy. There are no English equivalents to the Oriental works by Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Nerval, and Flaubert, just as Lane’s early Orientalist counterparts—Sacy and Renan—were considerably more aware than he was of how much they were creating what they wrote about. The form of such works as Kinglake’s Eothen (1844) and Burton’s Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1855–1856) is rigidly chronological and dutifully linear, as if what the authors were describing was a shopping trip to an Oriental bazaar rather than an adventure. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 493

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 493
• XREF: connects to: French and British Orientalist expertise differ in kind and political scope — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 623; French Oriental imagination compensated for absence of colonial sovereignty; British Oriental imagination was constrained by actual colonial possession (+1 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: French and British Orientalist expertise differ in kind and political scope — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 623; French Oriental imagination compensated for absence of colonial sovereignty; British Oriental imagination was constrained by actual colonial possession (+1 more)