The “other” has become a prominent theme in literary critical analysis. At the social and political level, its currency has been the result of two significant social and political events in the twentieth century: the clashes between colonizer and colonized in the 1940s and 50s, and the development of the new feminist movement in the 1970s. The rise of post-colonial studies and of feminist theory - the intellectual counterparts of these events - have profoundly influenced Anglo-American literary criticism of the late twentieth century. The “other” is the calling card of these critical paradigms. In relation to Western European literature, the concern with the “other” leads primarily to an attention to the representation of women or of indigenous or non-European peoples in literary texts. For instance, the passage on the “poor Indian” in the first epistle of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man stands out as an example of the status of native Americans in the early-eighteenth century imagination: