Henning Trüper is Researcher at Leibniz Zentrum für Kultur- und Literaturforschung, Berlin, Germany. He is the author of Typography of a Method: François Louis Ganshof and the Writing of History (2014) and co-editor of Historical Teleologies in the Modern World (with Dipesh Chakrabarty and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

This is easily the most serious and sophisticated study of Orientalism, going well beyond arguments about its relationship with imperialism to see how philology in particular came to represent a sustained anxiety about legibility and the very possibility of a theory of reading. Far from being an intellectually marginal or purely instrumental field of scholarship, Orientalism, Philology and the Illegibility of the Modern World turns out to be the privileged site for an epistemological crisis in modern Europe.

• List of IllustrationsPreface: History in Meaning1. After Philology, a Wild Goose Chase2. The Suicide of Naffa' wad 'Etmân3. The Travel Diary4. The Archive of Epigraphy5. Burdened with Gods6. A Trade in ShadowsConclusion: The Grammar of ModernityUnpublished SourceBibliographyIndex

Henning Trüper is Researcher at Leibniz Zentrum für Kultur- und Literaturforschung, Berlin, Germany. He is the author of Typography of a Method: François Louis Ganshof and the Writing of History (2014) and co-editor of Historical Teleologies in the Modern World (with Dipesh Chakrabarty and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

This is easily the most serious and sophisticated study of Orientalism, going well beyond arguments about its relationship with imperialism to see how philology in particular came to represent a sustained anxiety about legibility and the very possibility of a theory of reading. Far from being an intellectually marginal or purely instrumental field of scholarship, Orientalism, Philology and the Illegibility of the Modern World turns out to be the privileged site for an epistemological crisis in modern Europe.

• List of IllustrationsPreface: History in Meaning1. After Philology, a Wild Goose Chase2. The Suicide of Naffa' wad 'Etmân3. The Travel Diary4. The Archive of Epigraphy5. Burdened with Gods6. A Trade in ShadowsConclusion: The Grammar of ModernityUnpublished SourceBibliographyIndex

Henning Trüper is Researcher at Leibniz Zentrum für Kultur- und Literaturforschung, Berlin, Germany. He is the author of Typography of a Method: François Louis Ganshof and the Writing of History (2014) and co-editor of Historical Teleologies in the Modern World (with Dipesh Chakrabarty and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

This is easily the most serious and sophisticated study of Orientalism, going well beyond arguments about its relationship with imperialism to see how philology in particular came to represent a sustained anxiety about legibility and the very possibility of a theory of reading. Far from being an intellectually marginal or purely instrumental field of scholarship, Orientalism, Philology and the Illegibility of the Modern World turns out to be the privileged site for an epistemological crisis in modern Europe.

• List of IllustrationsPreface: History in Meaning1. After Philology, a Wild Goose Chase2. The Suicide of Naffa' wad 'Etmân3. The Travel Diary4. The Archive of Epigraphy5. Burdened with Gods6. A Trade in ShadowsConclusion: The Grammar of ModernityUnpublished SourceBibliographyIndex