The value of literature lies partly in the way it structures our feelings about the world and others in it, providing imaginative access to alternative experiences. In literature, the assumption that the novel form itself and the values it is said to carry are in some way an embodiment of the pure flowering of post-Enlightenment Western culture ignores other models for the development of prose fiction and overlooks the ways that cultures inform each other through their historical proximity and interaction and how their creative genres take shape in part due to that contact.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 49