Displaced onto a Muslim Orient : Romantic Desire and Manichean Aesthetics– Raiding the Exotic : English Travel Books to the Near East – The “Orientalist Canon” in the Humanist Tradition : Patterns of Resistance and Subordination – Vathek’s Romantic Grotesque and the Gaze of the Patriarch – Beckford’s Popular Orientalism : The “Arabian Nightism” of vathek – The Contaminating contact with otherness : Revisionism and the disruption of history in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights – The taming of the Sultan – Rasselas and the colonial Discourse – The Arabic context of Johnson’s Rasselas – Decentring the Metropolis : Dickens’ Magic Realism versus Utilitarian Pragmatics – Translation as Appropriation : The case of Fitz Gerlad’s Rubaiyat– Arabian Nightism in Retrospect.