Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662–1785 by Ros Ballaster; and Fables of the East: Selected Tales 1662–1785 by Ros Ballaster (review)

61 Cranston, he argues, is ‘‘irritatingly vague’’ on Locke’s politics of the 1680s, while Richard Ashcraft’s Revolutionary Politics, where we had looked to make up that fault, is riddled with elementary errors. In ‘‘Pierre Des Maizeaux, A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Locke, and the Foundation of the Locke Canon,’’ Philip Milton treats Des Maizeaux ’s additions to the Locke canon and cautions against non-Lockean works that have long added to Locke’s canon. James G. Buickerwood and Earl Havens’s ‘‘Lasting Monuments to the Admiration of Posterity: Charting Locke’s Legacy’’ cries out against the ‘‘false economy’’ of cheap editions and the reissue of Fraser’s Essay: ‘‘Now perhaps officially classifiable as undead.’’ In ‘‘Citizens, Wives, Latent Citizens and Non-Citizens in the Two Treatises: A Legacy of Inclusion, Exclusion, and Assimilation,’’ Barbara Arneil comes down hard on Locke for excluding women and idiots from citizenship, subsuming the former in the private sphere as wives. Ian Harris’s ‘‘The Legacy of Two Treatises of Government’’ ripostes that Locke did not distinguish between public and private sphere, but between government and society, that he contributed to raising women’s status when he discarded Aristotelian biology, that natural convenience (not law or right) gives husbands the last word in marital quarrels , and that the marriage contract might permit wives to leave husbands. John Yolton is represented two ways: in a chewy review essay concerning ‘‘the way of ideas’’ vs. a ‘‘logic of ideas ,’’ and in a review cum memoir by Peter Lopston of Mr. Yolton’s Two Intellectual Worlds. We see him in class, working patiently through a text, and behind the wheel, driving students two hours to monthly discussion meetings. A surprising treat is Gabriel Glickman ’s ‘‘Andrew Michael Ramsay (1681 –1743), the Jacobite Court and the English Catholic Enlightenment.’’ Ramsay briefly tutored Prince Charles Edward in the 1720s. J. R. Jones dismissed the English Catholic community as ‘‘intellectually negligible,’’ overlooking both Dryden and Pope, one a convert, the other a son of the community. Usefully recontextualizing Pope, Mr. Glickman could have mentioned Ramsay’s admiration for Swift, a tribute to both men. At the price and with the quality of its content, this admirable collection deserved better proofreading. Perhaps the authors themselves were made responsible for their essays? Shame and disgrace , then, to them: they know who they are, and so will their readers. Regina Janes Skidmore College ROS BALLASTER. Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662– 1785. Oxford: Oxford, 2005. Pp. xiii ⫹ 408. $45. ROS BALLASTER. Fables of the East: Selected Tales 1662–1785. Oxford: Oxford , 2005. Pp. vii ⫹ 277. $95; $35 (paper ). In this pair of volumes, Ms. Ballaster surveys many texts translated from or inspired by the Eastern tradition during the precolonial period (from the British acquisition of Bombay in 1662 to the founding of the Asiatick Society of Bengal by Sir William Jones in 1784 and Warren Hastings’s retirement as governor-general of India in 1785). Fabulous Orients is an account of the ways tales and collections from the Middle 62 East, India, and China became part of the British literary tradition; Fables of the East, an anthology of ‘‘Oriental’’ or orientalizing texts of the period, some little-known and hard to find. Fabulous Orients begins with ‘‘Narrative Moves’’ and ‘‘Shape-Shifting,’’ two chapters that deal with eastern tales as a group. (I will pass over the autobiographical musings in the first few pages, stressing the similarities of Ms. Ballaster’s position as second daughter with that of Scheherezade’s younger sister Dinarzade, in stunned silence.) As Ms. Ballaster points out, most eastern fictions came to Britain through France, often as translations of translations of translations. The migration of story from East to West is a ‘‘narrative move’’ that accompanies a shift of political power. But Ms. Ballaster also emphasizes the ways eastern narratives moved British readers, exciting their sympathetic identification with or ‘‘imaginary projection’’ into a foreign culture. She claims, drawing on Edward Said’s insights , that this identification with the ‘‘other’’ became a defining characteristic of the early Western imperial imagination . She also believes that the narrative ‘‘moves’’ or structural strategies in complex fictions like...