This study is both broad and detailed, ranging from East India Company writings about Afghanistan to more recent works about Afghanistan, their controversies and their reception. A recommended read for anyone interested in the history of ideas about the country and the many conflicts that have been fought on Afghan soil.

Corinne Fowler, University of Leicester

“In this fascinating literary history, Zubeda Jalalzai surveys two centuries of Anglophone writing on Afghanistan that blurred the line between fact and fantasy. Revealing the seductive power of prose, she shows how even authors of Afghan origin were ultimately drawn into this romantic mythopoesis.”

Nile Green, UCLA; editor of Afghan History through Afghan Eyes

Zubeda Jalalzai gives us a chronological look at depictions of Afghanistan by writers from the West (including Afghan emigrants such as myself). In the process, she teases out the many strands of agenda, intention, convention, context and perspective—political, personal, literary, social, historical and cultural—that shape and color these writers’ depictions of Afghanistan. How the imagined Afghanistan developed by Western writers relates to the actuality of Afghanistan as a whole remains a question, but that answer lies outside the scope of Jalalzai’s work and perhaps anyone's. What she’s given us does sharpen at least this reader's appetite to go on seeking that answer, even as it suggests the futility such a search must finally entail, given the subtleties, nuances, and complexity of the noumenon that is Afghanistan.

Tamim Ansary, author of Games Without Rules, The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan