Travel and imaginative literature helped build Orientalist discourse

Evidence

The official intellectual genealogy of Orientalism would certainly include Gobineau, Renan, Humboldt, Steinthal, Burnouf, Remusat, Palmer, Weil, Dozy, Muir, to mention a few famous names almost at random from the nineteenth century. It would also include the diffusive capacity of learned societies: the Société asiatique, founded in 1822; the Royal Asiatic Society, founded in 1823; the American Oriental Society, founded in 1842; and so on. But it might perforce neglect the great contribution of imaginative and travel literature, which strengthened the divisions established by Orientalists between the various geographical, temporal, and racial departments of the Orient. Such neglect would be incorrect, since for the Islamic Orient this literature is especially rich and makes a significant contribution to building the Orientalist discourse. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 275

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the genealogical map of Orientalism built in earlier chapters of this book (Said’s own genealogy chapter); relevant to how later Islamophobia scholarship traces its intellectual inheritance. — connects to: Early American Orientalist tales depicted Easterners as convertible through democracy and love; Said locates Orientalism’s founding structure in Aeschylean tragedy — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 737
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 275