Strange Truths in Undiscovered Lands: Shelley’s Poetic Development and Romantic Geography by Nahoko Miyamoto Alvey

296 BOOK REVIEWS strength ofthe volume as a whole. It takes him into little charted territories ofmusical and literary production ofthe eighteenth-century and Romantic periods, which end up redrawing the cultural maps we thought we had by heart. In this important enterprise, Brown is a seriously entertaining and lucid guide. What with its promiscuous love for music, poetry, art and phi­ losophy; its skepticism toward ideology and the orotundities of the sub­ lime; and corresponding fondness for the unregarded domains of fantasy and anacreontic stylings, I was put in mind of another gifted, pleasureloving skeptic whose name is never mentioned in the book. Leigh Hunt would have loved The Tooth That Nibbles at the Soul. Indeed, with more serious musical training, and a little time travel, he might have written it. Gillen D’Arcy Wood University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Nahoko Miyamoto Alvey. Strange Truths in Undiscovered Lands: Shelley’s Poetic Development and Romantic Geography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Pp. 224. $55.00. Alvey’s book is the latest in a series of explorations of Shelley and the East, which has included important contributions from Frederic Colwell, Nigel Leask, and Benjamin Colbert. The book comprises five chapters, covering “Queen Mab,” “Alastor,” “Mont Banc,” Prometheus Unbound, and “The Witch ofAtlas.” Alvey’s predominant concern is to examine themes of im­ perialism, cross-cultural curiosity, and representation of the other, an em­ phasis that has been a productive vein in Shelley criticism for over twenty years. Alvey’s book seals and to some extent concludes this sequence of scholarship. Alvey’s introduction traces the genesis and orientation of the abovementioned sequence. She then begins her argument proper with a chapter on “Queen Mab,” where her intent is to show how versatile Shelley’s rhetoric of otherness is, incorporating both the near but marginal (Wales and other portions of the “Celtic fringe”) with the far and even mythical (the Americans and Atlantis). Atlantis, as a place of mystery and storied an­ tiquity, shares an “obscurity and remoteness from contemporary Europe” (36) with the East, and it is in this spirit that Alvey suggests that Mayan and Aztec ruins are referenced in “Queen Mab.” In a mythopoeic sense, Atlantis—as Alvey demonstrates in her second chapter, on “Alastor,”— foregrounds perhaps the central conceptual innovation in her book. This is the importance to Shelley of a certain doubling of the referent of the Cau­ casus, to cover both the Caucasus on the east side of the Black Sea as well SiR, 51 (Summer 2012) BOOK REVIEWS 297 as “the Indian Caucasus,” the mountains of Kashmir or, more generally, the “Hindoo-Kho” (ill) or modern-day Hindu Kush. This “ambiguity” was vital for Shelley, and the valence of the doubling is obvious. In IndoEuropean terms, it naturalizes India to the West in much the same way as Sir William Jones’s discovery ofthe shared linguistic aspects ofSanskrit and European tongues. In racial terms, it takes the Caucasus—the locus classicus, after all, of what had already been “the Caucasian”—whiteness—with the non-white east. Thus both the origins of Europe and its salient others are to be found secreted in a mysterious mountain ambit. Alvey does some very precise geographical reading here, but while some of her insights are cogent, others are more hit-or-miss. Her engagement with this splendidly forlorn, Miltonic passage is exemplary: He wandered on Till vast Aornos seen from Petra’s steep Hung o’er the low horizon like a cloud; Through Balk, and where the desolated tombs Of Parthian kings scatter to every wind Their wasting dust . . . It is notable how “the lone Chorasmian shore,” which the first-time reader of the poem no doubt just jots down as a bit of obscure detail, be­ comes one of the poem’s aural signposts to the veteran reader. Alvey rightly sees “Petra” as not the most apparent referent, the city of red rocks in present-day Jordan, but the Rock of Sogdiana in what is now eastern Iran; Aryan in other words, not Arab. While she exerts a more impressive command of the welter of historical data than some of her predecessors, these crypto-Persian references are...

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