The East is imagined as a monstrous wasteland arrested in time

Evidence

As the book begins, the Englishman Jonathon Harker departs the civilized world of Vienna and Munich, “leaving the West and entering the East,” and enters the wasteland of Transylvania, passing through a town that still bears the marks of a seventeenth-century war (it is arrested in time, like all of the East), with roadside shrines and “peasants meeting him with warnings or charms and gifts to ward off evil.” This landscape is “primitive, sublime, and horrifying.” The wasteland of Transylvania functions as a character in Stoker’s text, a malevolent monster that entraps and terrorizes (and often kills) all those who enter it. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 427

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism and the timeless-East trope the reader is mapping across Western imagination.
• FICTION: The East-as-monstrous-character (landscape as malevolent being) is a reusable device.