Love this connection to Romanticism, and you're totally spot on! A lot of the novels that Said talks about develop immediately after the Romantic movement. What's also really striking, and what your comment reminds me of is that around the same time in Romanticism that there was a burst of Orientalism there was also a burst in Medievalism. The two have long gone hand and hand, and I suspect it has to do with fantasies around the Ottoman Empire at its height during the Middle Ages.