Travel narratives and historical works shaped the perception of Muslims and the East in the
Victorian and post-Victorian periods. Analyzing the discourses on Muslims which originated in
the European Middle Ages the first part of the book discusses the troubled legacy of the
encounters between the East and the West and locates the nineteenth-century texts concerning
the Saracens and their lands in the liminal space between history and fiction. Drawing on the
nineteenth-century models the second part of the book looks at fictional and non-fictional
works of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century which re-established the Oriental
obsession stimulating dread and resentment and even more strongly setting the Civilized West
against the Barbaric East. Here medieval metaphorical enemies of Mankind - the World the Flesh
and the Devil - reappear in different contexts: the world of immigration of white women
desiring Muslim men and the present-day freedom fighters.
