‘Orientalism is after all a system for citing works and authors […] a marvellous instance of the interrelations between society, history, and textuality.’ In his influential work of intellectual history, Edward Said offers a system of representations for the cultural role played by the Orient in the West. Many European representations of the Arab-Islamic world are scrutinised for students of literature and criticism, contemporary students of the Orient and, last but not least, the general reader. The power of Said's Orientalism (1978) lies in its ability to categorise and thereby give order to the multitude of Western conceptions and treatments of the East. By rendering the Orient knowledgeable in its multilayered forms, Said illuminated his readers on the richness of Orientalist discourse. Among producers of Orientalist discourse, he mentions impersonal writers offering a scientific observation of the East (aptly exemplified by Edward William Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians), as well as semi-impersonal writers less willing to sacrifice their eccentricity (as in the case of Burton's Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah) and personal Orientalist authors who experienced their metaphorical or real trips to the East as an epiphanic moment of growth (a paramount example is provided by Nerval's Voyage en Orient).

Despite the controversial reception of Orientalism, which was criticised partly for emphasising the irreconcilable division between East and West and partly for seeing the discipline as either a conscious body of knowledge (manifest Orientalism) or an unconscious body of knowledge (latent Oientalism), Said's work deeply influenced Orientalist scholars from Sam Selvon to Salman Rushdie and Homi Bhabha and continues to spark debate even today. Even though Said's discussion focused exclusively on European representations of the Middle East, his illuminating framework has been extended to a range of analyses of essentially very different aspects, or even geographical parts of the East. As attested to in a quite recent study by Mohamed Amine Brahimi and Clarisse Fordant entitled ‘The Controversial Receptions of Edward Said’ (2017), the most cited book by scholars from North America and Western Europe who investigated the relationship between history and literature is Orientalism.