Exoticism, on Bongie's definition, was a nineteenth-century literary and existential practice that posited another space beyond a modernity thought to have destroyed value at home. Its early optimism soured in the second half of the century as colonial and technological power spread everywhere, leaving writers to mourn an elsewhere their own civilisation was absorbing. Verne's Les enfants du capitaine Grant supplies the opening case, its Maori resistance presented as a still autonomous world whose survival already hangs on the luck of weapons; Lévi-Strauss and Pasolini repeat the gesture a century later, announcing that the elsewhere has gone while quietly postponing its disappearance. Chapters on Victor Segalen, Conrad and Pasolini follow what remains once the exotic has become a memory. Bongie refuses a neutral vantage point, adopting the nostalgia he examines and using categories like civilisation and savagery that his own analysis discredits, to argue about living within late capitalism.