An "Inconceivable Pleasure" and the Philadelphia Minerva : Erotic Liberalism, Oriental Tales, and the Female Subject in Periodicals of the Early Republic

The Arabian Romance of America in Poe's “Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade”

“…7 Mark Kamrath thus traces the presence, in early American periodicals, of oriental tales that formed a vital transition between "the politics of patriarchal authority and self-sacrifice, and a liberal culture of passionate self-interest, 'pluralist consensus,' and capitalist politics." 8 The former values appeared under threat by the latter, which seemed dangerous imports not just in oriental tales but in such novels as Susanna Rowson's Charlotte, A Tale of Truth (1791), whose innocent American heroine is ruined by "foreign" agents, all of whom have Francophone names. The notice American literary criticism has begun to take of the orientalism or "Islamicism" of its own texts, however, has not only helped to trace an important ideological shift in U.S. culture.…”