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Item Travelling Novel Post Orientalism and the postmodern NarrativeMohan, AnupamaThe Foucauldian framework he deployed in Orientalism (1978) led Edward Said to argue that a “systematic discipline” ideologically buttressed, and subsumed, the imperialist “discourse” of Western supremacy. Some literary manifestations of postmodernism and postcolonialism, however, have continued to be implicated in an imaginative reworking of space that can be traced back to Orientalism, signalling the possibility of deploying Orientalist tropes contrapuntally. Postmodern place-making creates unique topoi that can be studied as comprising a topology, one that is structured by a systematic array of tropes, thus also necessitating a tropology, or a systematic study of the recurrent images in a particular tradition. In my thesis, I use the phrase “post-Orientalism” to follow and examine the t(r)opology of select postmodern and postcolonial narratives. Post-Orientalism allows one, I argue, to pursue, assemble, and then closely examine the richly cross-connected itineraries of specific tropes such as domes, labyrinths, libraries, and museums, among others, in tandem with the formal frames of the social realist novel, the mystery story, and the uncanny narrative in ways that are creatively generative of interpretive possibilities, an effect we lose out on if we were not to look beyond the porous surfaces of “East” and “West,” “Orient” and “Occident.” In my thesis, I use “post-Orientalist” as a way to understand a particular network of intertexts that appears in several works of fiction, metafiction, as well as nonfiction that reference the Orient to define their setting. For this network, two bodies of writings are key: the first text, the One Thousand and One Nights, itself becomes a trope through repeated citation and referentiality, serving as both a narratological model of intertextuality and an inexhaustible reservoir of Oriental imagery. The second component of this network is the corpus of writings of Jorge Luis Borges, whose unique metatextual self-reflexivity has influenced postmodern and metafictional literature throughout the world since the late twentieth century. The first three chapters of my project examine the afterlife of the above network of intertexts in the works of a few major novelists that have been vitally shaped by the East-West binary: Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, and Umberto Eco. I inquire how the post-Orientalist t(r)opology travels – between continents, authors, genres, and gender(s). Hence, my fourth chapter is devoted to its occurrence in genres other than postmodern metafiction: the travel narratives of William Dalrymple and Amitav Ghosh, and the works of two non-European female authors who occupy a contrapuntal position in the history of contemporary Orientalist literature: Hanan al-Shaykh and Elif Shafak.