Introduction.

This article presents an overview of the book Eighteenth-Century Life: Exoticism and the Culture of Exploration, edited by Robert P. Maccubbin and Christia Knellwolf. The objective of this book is to examine the cultural contacts as they are expressed in eighteenth-century images, ideas, and myths about the exotic. Discussion of the hopes and fears behind the act of creating aesthetic abstractions of the exotic enabled a better understanding of the rationale behind the formation of stereotypes about ethnically specific identity. The exotic was a response to naval exploration and discovery, but from the moment the idea first entered European consciousness, it belonged to the realm of fiction and fantasy.