The Orient of the Boulevards: Exoticism, Empire, and Nineteenth-Century French Theater

The author draws upon the methodologies of theater and cultural studies to examine the construction of "the Orient" on the Parisian stage during the nineteenth century, the period of France's first imperial expansions into North Africa and the Middle East.

As an increasingly large segment of the French population moved into contact with the Middle East and North Africa as soldiers, colonial administrators, settlers, and merchants, the balance between fantasy and immediacy in Orientalized dra...