The Exotic and the Creative Imagination in the 1960s: Charles Perrault's Les Hommes Illustres.

This article examines the semantic context for the emergence of the concept of the exotic and creative imagination focusing on Charles Perrault's Les Hommes illustres. Clearly, an interest in that which is étanger and curieux runs through the categories of Perrault's Hommes illustres: churchmen, statesmen, scholars, artisans are marked by contact with non-European cultures. Perrault's knowledge of the foreign, from the New World to Siam, was extensive; his text illustrates the moment of transition in the European attitude to the foreign and to what we now think as the exotic. On the other hand, where curiosity was aroused by the foreign, it was intellectual and scholarly. Before the exotic could acquire that sense of excitement, imagination would first have to be seen as a source of error, but as a source of insight and creative power.