171. The Revolt of Islam by Percy Bysshe Shelley

The title of Shelley’s epic The Revolt of Islam is perhaps better known today than it used to be. But in its earliest edition the poem was called Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City. In 1818 ‘revolution’ inevitably meant France, and Shelley’s publishers were nervous chaps; they quickly requested a change to something more innocuous, and The Revolt of Islam, strange to modern ears, was chosen so as not to frighten the horses. Oriental exoticism, in publishing terms, was ‘safe’. But ‘Islam’, which refers to the religion of the tyrant Othman in the poem, has little to do with the poem’s main themes, which are concerned with political liberty and doomed love: Shelley himself admitted that the poem was ‘without much attempt at minute delineation of Mahometan manners’, and that it ‘might be supposed to take place in an European nation.’

Consulted:
Nigel Leask: British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (2004)

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