Lane’s seemingly neutral account was heavily edited and constructed

Evidence

Lane’s classic, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), was the self-conscious result of a series of works and of two periods of residence in Egypt (1825–1828 and 1833–1835). One uses the phrase “self-conscious” with some emphasis here because the impression Lane wished to give was that his study was a work of immediate and direct, unadorned and neutral, description, whereas in fact it was the product of considerable editing (the work he wrote was not the one he finally published) and also of a considerable variety of quite special efforts. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 406

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: The gap between the impression of neutral description and its constructed editing foreshadows arguments about the manufactured realism of colonial knowledge.

Related

• Orientalist writing edited the Orient to shield European sensibility from its strangeness (similarity 0.81)
• Edward Lane’s canonical ethnography of Egypt began as a camera-lucida drawing project (similarity 0.79)
• Orientalist works are best read as authorial detail within an imperial discursive space (similarity 0.79)