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East-West Fiction as World Literature: The Hayy Problem Reconfigured
- Eighteenth-Century Studies
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 47, Number 2, Winter 2014
- pp. 195-231
- 10.1353/ecs.2014.0001
- Article
- Additional Information
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This article focuses on the reception history of translations of Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan and how natural theodicy, empiricist experimentalism, and philosophical fiction influenced eighteenth-century England. Discussing the status of Ibn Tufayl’s ideas in relation to Edward Pococke, John Locke, Robert Boyle, and Daniel Defoe allows scholars to go beyond the East-West dichotomy and instead create an opening from eighteenth-century studies onto recent debates around world literature. Using Hayy as a prism, we can understand the opportunities as well as the drawbacks of a world literature paradigm, as theorized by Wolfgang von Goethe, Erich Auerbach, and more recent scholars.