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

Abstract

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 latest in a series of explorations of Shelley and East, which has included important contributions from Frederic Colwell, Nigel Leask, and Benjamin Colbert. book comprises five chapters, covering Queen Mab, Alastor, Mont Banc, Prometheus Unbound, and The Witch of Atlas. Alvey's predominant concern is to examine themes of imperialism, cross-cultural curiosity, and representation of other, an emphasis 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 genesis and orientation of 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 near but marginal (Wales and other portions of Celtic fringe) with far and even mythical (the Americans and Atlantis). Atlantis, as a place of mystery and storied antiquity, shares an obscurity and remoteness from contemporary (36) with 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 Mastor,--foregrounds perhaps central conceptual innovation in her book. This is importance to Shelley of a certain doubling of referent of to cover both Caucasus on east side of Black Sea as well as the Indian Caucasus, mountains of Kashmir or, more generally, Hindoo-Kho (111) or modern-day Hindu Kush. This ambiguity was vital for Shelley, and valence of doubling is obvious. In Indo-European terms, it naturalizes India to West in much same way as Sir William Jones's discovery of shared linguistic aspects of Sanskrit and European tongues. In racial terms, it takes Caucasus--the locus classicus, after all, of what had already been the Caucasian--whiteness--with non-white east. Thus both 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 low horizon like a cloud; Through Balk, and where desolated tombs Of Parthian kings scatter to every wind Their wasting dust ... It is notable how the lone Chorasmian shore, which first-time reader of poem no doubt just jots down as a bit of obscure detail, becomes one of poem's aural signposts to veteran reader. Alvey rightly sees Petra as not most apparent referent, city of red rocks in present-day Jordan, but Rock of Sogdiana in what is now eastern Iran; Aryan in other words, not Arab. While she exerts a more impressive command of welter of historical data than some of her predecessors, these crypto-Persian references are one place where Alvey stumbles denotatively. For example, Alvey talks about relevance of Balk as a referent to Achaemenid Empire and to Alexander's conquest. Shelley, though, makes clear that valence is Parthian, that is, in later Hellenistic period when Parthians ruled part of former Persian realm. Similarly, Alvey refers to Persian empires (76). Strictly speaking (if one equates old and pre-Islamic), there were only two of these: Achaemenid and Sassanid. Parthians were not really Persians in core sense, but a related if distinct minority group whose empire was medial and often weak. …