Abstract

Recent studies have failed to examine the foreigner's influence upon the European consciousness. Prior critical works such as Srinivas Aravamudan's Tropicopolitans, and Edward Said's Orientalism , study the influence of Europe upon the colonial and the colonial's ability to resist the over-generalizing and oppressive drive of European colonialist expansion. ;In my dissertation, I argue that a reciprocity exists between the cultures, and this reciprocity has not, yet, been sufficiently explored within eighteenth-century critical works. I use the concept of cosmopolitanism to work out the reciprocal interactions between the European consciousness and its experience with the foreign, examining philosophical texts, drama of the English Renaissance, seventeenth-century travel narratives, and eighteenth-century literature. ;I trace how this reciprocity exists through chronicling the development of the concept of cosmopolitanism, which experiences a transformation in the European consciousness within the eighteenth century: moving from a form of representative universalism, which seeks to enfold all humans under one universalizing ideal towards a complex universalism, which seeks to account for alternate and particular views. I show how this transition occurs through using systems theory, which accounts for complex interrelations between cultural, economic, and political systems