Diverging Routes

Abstract

Today, it is easy to ridicule the pursuits discussed throughout this book. They were already mocked in their own day. The French writer Pierre Loti and his fictitious mosque devoted to the mourning of an impossible intercultural love springs to mind. But the assumption made here is that they should be taken seriously because they say something about how one related to the past and inhabited the world in the age of empire, spectacle and industry. The past seemed proximate at the time, and the world wide open.