Examines American and Middle Eastern texts in studies of Orientalism and Occidentalism, and argues for a new approach to cultural studies that incorporates a wider variety of materials.

In an unusual approach to cultural studies, John Maier examines a wide variety of modern Western and Eastern texts. He brings together very different forms of cultural production: modern and postmodern fiction and folktales, advertising copy and oral histories, travel literature, and ethnographic studies. Many academic disciplines are also juxtaposed-literature and literary theory, linguistics, history, psychoanalysis, sociology, film studies, women's studies, and anthropology-largely because they have themselves been transformed by the cultural questions raised here.