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The Turk of Early Modern France
- L'Esprit Créateur
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 53, Number 4, Winter 2013
- pp. 1-8
- 10.1353/esp.2013.0045
- Article
- Additional Information
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The most pervasive oriental figure in early modern French art and letters, the Turk undergoes a significant transformation from the sixteenth to the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. While two of his main features, violence and lasciviousness, and a general ambivalence toward the Turk persist throughout this period, a deeply-rooted fear of the Ottomans during the Renaissance gradually yields to a desire to contain and domesticate them in the classical age. The Turk of early modern France emerges as both stable and flexible, predictable and unique, one and many. As a fiction in flux, he also allows for a renewed critical engagement with Orientalism as a “system of thought” (Said).