Gauthier notes how Baxter's awestruck response to “Dover Beach” means that his “ 'difference' is erased and he proves himself open to conversion; he shifts from being a troubling and unpredictable other to a civilizable entity”

XREF: This connects to postcolonial theory on how canonical Western literature functioned as a tool of assimilation and cultural domination. FICTION: A character whose appreciation of high culture is read as submission to the governing power could dramatize this dynamic in a story.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 618