Recent work on the relationship between early nineteenth-century Orientalism and Romantic literary texts has successfully challenged and extended Said's definition of a monolithic construction of ‘the Orient’ by deploying psychoanalytic models of interpretation and imperialism. By giving psychoanalysis the status of a metaphorical economy, critics, such as John Barrell and Nigel Leask, have been able to articulate and display the various forms of the imaginary, whilst maintaining a committed concern for an underlying material, social reality. By taking ‘anxiety’ as his startingpoint, Leask focuses on the instability within Romantic constructions of ‘the East’ and he is able to expose the variety of impulses within Romantic Orientalism which are simultaneously collusive with and critical of the hegemony of imperialism. The interrelationship between British culture and its construction of ‘the East’ mixes absorption and dominance with identification and differentiation so that, as others have pointed out, there is a profound ambivalence at the heart of the Orientalist imagination as a result of the subject's ‘inoculation’ and the enzymic nature of change taking place in the colonial culture.