Although this question has already been answered, I wanted to point out a caveat: When retrieving XML using jQuery with Internet Explorer, you MUST specify content-type to be "text/xml" (or "application/xml") or else you will not be able to parse the data as if it were XML using jQuery.
You may be thinking that this is an obvious thing but it caught me when using Mozilla/Chrome/Opera instead of IE. When retrieving a "string" of XML with a content-type of "text", all browsers except IE will still allow you to parse that data (using jQuery selectors) as if it were XML. IE will not throw an error and will simply not return any results to a jQuery selection statement.
So, in your example, as long as you only need the string-serialized version of the XML and will not expect jQuery to do any sort of selection on the XML DOM, you can set the content-type to "text". But if you ALSO need to parse the XML with jQuery, you will need to write a custom routine that serializes the XML into a string for you, or else retrieve a version of the XML with content-type "xml".
Hope that helps someone :)