 Robert Irwin has said in the Times Literary Supplement that the theoretical flaw of Orientalism is its failure to distinguish between the numerous Orientalist writers , who held different cultural perspectives on and experiences of the Orient — the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ( who never traveled to the East ) , the French novelist Gustave Flaubert ( who toured Egypt ) , the French geographer Joseph @-@ Ernest Renan ( who advanced racist theories of inferiority of " Semitic peoples " ) , and the British translator and lexicographer Edward William Lane ( who was fluent in Arabic ) . 
