From the Alhambra to the Pawnee Hunting Grounds

Washington Irving arguably helped create nineteenth-century orientalism in the contrasts between Christian and Islamic cultures in The Alhambra (1832), as well as his historical studies of the fall of Grenade to Ferdinand and Isabella and of the fall of Spain to its Moslem conquerors seven centuries earlier After his return to the United States from Europe just as The Alhambra was being published, Irving seemed to import orientalism to the prairie in comparisons between American Indians and Arabs during the journey to the Indian Territory later recounted in A Tour on the Prairies (1835) Yet Irving's brand of orientalism shared little with the concept as redefined by Edward Said The emphasis on power in Said is replaced in Irving's works by a network of picturesque associations generated by his conception of Romanticism Although Irving did occasionally discriminate between different levels of the picturesque in ways that valued the true primitive above the partially Westernized, the broad thrust of his writings on foreign Irving sought through a series of metaphors to link them in a web of related impressions that could deepen, broaden, and enliven the consciousness of readers otherwise ensnared within the restricted intellectual and emotional compass of the commercial society of early nineteenth century America and Western Europe