Antedating of "Orientalism"

[Shapiro, Fred]

orientalism (OED3 1769)

1747 Joseph Spence _An Essay on Mr. Pope's Odyssey_ 189 (Eighteenth Century Collections Online)  This whole prophetical vision of the fall of the suitors, is the _true sublime_; and, in particular, gives us an higher _Orientalism_ than we meet with in any other part of Homer's writings.  You will pardon me a new word, where we have no old one to my purpose:  You know what I mean, that _Eastern way of expressing revolutions in government, by a confusion or extinction of light in the heavens_.


Fred Shapiro

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