While reading the oriental tales collected by Ros Ballaster in Fables of the East (FE), I was surprised to find myself constantly reminded of reading Samuel Richardson. It turns out I may have been right to make this connection since, according to Ballaster's accompanying study, Fabulous Orients (FO), the sequence of oriental tales offers a “site for the exploration and testing of the dynamics of (gendered) reading” (FO, 128), and it was surely such factors that made Richardson so popular and influential in his own day. Contemporary readers clearly found analogous pleasures not so much from similarity of plots, though female virtue is often in danger, or even from resemblances in style, but from what Ballaster terms the ways that these tales “move” their readers by means of a three-way relay between the actual reader, the teller of the tale, who is usually a subordinate female, and the listener, who is usually a dominant if not despotic male. And what this triangulation achieves, according to Ballaster, is giving voice to nothing less than a whole host of concerns—social, sexual, and political—that, during the eighteenth century, were central to the development of English prose fiction and literary culture more generally.

Enormously popular at the time, oriental tales themselves, of course, are characterized by fantastic characters—djinns and speaking parrots—as well as supernatural goings-on that belong to a fictive realm quite unlike the rational quotidian world evoked by Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding. But the “long journey from eastern magical tale to formal realism” (FO, 5) is, in a sense, the very story that gives shape to Ballaster's subtle and compelling argument throughout Fabulous Orients that “narrative moves.” At stake is not just how tales move the emotions of readers and listeners but the fact that narrative itself moved from East to West and, in doing so, changed the ways that Europeans thought about themselves and their place in the world. In moving between Eastern and Western political arenas, Ballaster points out, narrative maps one onto the other, thereby drawing attention to analogues and differences for tendentious purposes—social, political, and subjective. Oriental fables moved their European readers, stirring their emotions by transporting them to other, previously unknown, worlds. And in so doing, they promoted desired social and political changes in the addressee.

Ballaster's key example is the Arabian Night's Entertainments, the framed sequence of oriental tales that arrived in early eighteenth-century Europe via Antoine Galland's Mille et une nuits (1704–17), which, having been rapidly translated into English, promptly gave birth to numerous imitations in various subgenres. In the narrative frame, Scheherazade dissuades her tyrannical husband, Sultan Schariar, from the sexual jealousy that had inspired him “to wed [a new bride] every Night, and have her strangled next Morning” (FE, 31). In the figure of Scheherazade, Ballaster discovers a prototype of the intelligent and loquacious woman who, in demanding to be heard and effecting desirable change on behalf of the formerly disenfranchised, exemplifies the agency of speech against seemingly intractable power. Moreover, Ballaster suggests that Scheherazade's condition closely resembles how Europeans, the English in particular, wanted to represent themselves at the time within imperial terms: mobile, accretive, and transformative, capable of exercising command over formerly more powerful agencies. And it is this critical engagement with imperial discourse that gives historical depth and range to the argumentative scope of Fabulous Orients, which itself moves from analysis of tales set in the Ottoman and Persian empires to China and then back westward again to the Hindu and Mughal states of India.

In surveying tales originating in, or purporting to represent, these three Eastern locations, Ballaster describes how the movement of ideas and fictive forms was distinctly shaped both by the location being described and by the European nation being newly informed. While the empires of the Ottomans and Persians typically represented absolutist states inside which women were trapped but resistant subjects, for instance, a French version of a Persian tale satirizing royal power could reappear in English to illustrate the new empirical philosophy and in Italian as a meditation on true love. The supposed backwardness of these Islamic states contrasted with the ancient wisdom of China and high morality of Confucian belief, providing French and English writers with strategies for addressing philosophical and political concerns. India, in turn, constituted a dream space in which the unbounded European imagination could find unconstrained freedom, and which could also serve as a consolation.

Ballaster draws her illustrative examples in Fabulous Orients from a wide variety of texts—translations from putative oriental originals, imitations, histories, travelers’ reports, and heroic dramas with Eastern settings—many of them represented by carefully edited selections in the anthology Fables of the East. Together, these books persuasively confirm Edward Said's argument that, for European writers during this period, the “Orient” was “a species of fiction itself, a hybrid and manufactured product of imaginative investments on the part of the West” (FO, 32). Given the careful historicizing and discriminating critical analyses, I cannot imagine how even the most die-hard anti-Saidian will be able to mount a credible objection, though I am equally certain that some will object to Ballaster's controversial conclusion that “the realist occidental novel, like the western Enlightenment of which it was a part, was always already ‘oriental’” (FO, 58). Yet as we learn more of how the myth of European superiority was, from the Renaissance on, simply that, little more than a self-aggrandizing fable, Ballaster's splendid study of the nature and impact of the oriental tale on the development of English prose fiction during the eighteenth century is surely destined to achieve classic status, rivaling studies by Ian Watt, Michael McKeon, and Paul Hunter.

Indeed, both books deserve such success that Oxford University Press should be encouraged to reissue corrected versions. The students and general readers for whom Fables of the East is primarily intended deserve a “Works Cited,” at no extra cost, to encourage further reading. While typos in both books are remarkably few, some minor slips are worth noting: the Levant Company was not founded in 1578 but 1581, and Napoleon was still mere Bonaparte in the year he invaded Egypt (FE, 3); Pera is not on the other side of the Bosphorus from Istanbul but across the Golden Horn (FE, 276); “Arabian” refers to a breed of horses (FE, 19n); Alexander Ross was almost certainly not the translator of André du Ryer's French version of the Qur’an (FE, 7, and FO, 49, 78; a complicated problem, but see Alastair Hamilton and Francis Richard, André du Ryer and Oriental Studies in Seventeenth-Century France [Oxford: Arcadian Library, 2004], 111–15). That said, Ballaster is to be commended for restoring the prefatory material to her selection from Galland's Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, inexplicably omitted from the Oxford World's Classics edition, which claims to reproduce “in its entirety the earliest English translation” (back cover).