Abstract

In “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade,” Edgar Allan Poe presents his criticism of the Orientalist discourse of his time, explaining ultimately the conditions that empowered and sustained this discourse for a long time. This authorial standpoint is traced and reconstructed in the process of three stages. First, Poe introduces an Orientalist narrator who constructs a typical Orientalized text by creating a sequel to the frame story of the “Arabian Nights.” Second, the narrator’s text is deconstructed in a way that renders Poe clearly dissociated from the multiple narrators within his story and attracts attention to his counter-Orientalist attitude. Third, the complex structure of the tale, composed of different narratives within a frame story, and the gaps and contradictions within these narrative levels reflect necessarily how the Orientalist discourse of Poe’s time is based upon a process of simulations that makes the whole system of Orientalism devoid of any truth.