Edward Said’s Orientalism is one of the defining works of twentieth-century cultural criticism: a study of how Europe constructed “the Orient” as an object of knowledge, fantasy, administration and rule.

Said’s argument is that knowledge is never produced outside power. Scholarship, literature, philology, travel writing and colonial government collectively created a system in which the East became something the West could describe, classify and speak for.

Moving through Napoleon’s Egypt, nineteenth-century Orientalist scholarship, literary representations and modern imperial politics, Said traces how repeated descriptions harden into apparent truths. The “Orient” becomes sensual, irrational, backward, timeless; Europe becomes rational, modern and authoritative by contrast. Representation here is productive rather than merely reflective, when something repeats, it is repeated often enough to help manufacture the object it claims only to observe.

First published in 1978, Orientalism profoundly reshaped literary criticism, postcolonial studies, history, anthropology and political thought. It has also generated decades of argument about its generalisations, historical method and treatment of Orientalist scholarship—which is partly why it remains alive rather than embalmed as a canonical text. 

Peregrine Books / Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1987.  Paperback. Moderate rubbing and edge wear to covers, with creasing and wear at corners and spine ends. Pages lightly age-toned; internally clean and binding sound. Good condition.