‘[S]ince one cannot ontologically obliterate the Orient […], one does have the means to capture it, treat it, describe it, improve it, radically alter it’ (Said 1977: 95). In the second chapter of Orientalism, Edward Said suggests that we know the Orient through three different cognitive modes, which can be summarised according to David E. Rumelhart and Donald A. Norman's classification (1978) of knowledge acquisition: that is, accretion, tuning and restructuring. In Said's verbal phrases ‘to capture it’, ‘treat it’ and ‘describe it’, the reader may easily identify a process of accretion, which means accumulating information about Eastern culture. In order to capture, treat and describe the Orient, it is necessary to learn its history, culture and religion, which are examples of learning through accretion. Such learning about the East must occur through appropriate exposure to the concepts and classifications of Orientalism to be acquired, in order to transform information about the East into some appropriate memory representation that is added to the person's database of knowledge. Secondly, ‘to improve the Orient’ involves actual changes in the very categories we use for interpreting the East and what cognitive linguistics calls ‘schemas’. These categories undergo continual tuning or minor modification to bring them more into congruence with the Western world. Thus, tuning involves the evolution of Oriental structures into new ones by adjusting the variable terms of Oriental schemas. And thirdly, ‘to radically alter’ the Orient means learning through restructuring, which involves the creation of new Oriental structures in order to allow for new interpretations, and therefore the acquisition of a new knowledge of the East. In this process, according to schema theory, the existing Oriental schema is restructured by substituting its variable components so that a new schema can be patterned on an old one.

Defined by Said as ‘the distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority […] a set of constraints upon and limitations of thought’ (42), Orientalism acquires new meanings for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, widely recognised as the most dynamic group of revolutionary artists ever to work in Britain.