Piya Pal-Lapinski's Istanbul and the Ottoman Empire in Romantic and Victorian Culture is an extraordinary book. Her study takes nineteenth-century Istanbul/Constantinople and the Ottoman Empire as its subject, but its intellectual geography is considerably larger. Moving between Romantic and Victorian literature, Byzantine, Ottoman, and Modern Greek history, architecture, opera, travel writing, Gothicism, folklore, material and visual culture, religion, nationalism, and imperial politics, Pal-Lapinski reconstructs a nineteenth-century world whose interconnectedness exceeds the disciplinary categories through which scholars have studied it. The result is a deeply learned and original book that makes a substantial contribution not only to Romantic and Victorian Studies but also to Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies (and beyond).

At the heart of the book is a geographical and conceptual question: where, exactly, does Istanbul belong? Nineteenth-century British and European writers repeatedly attempted to organize the Ottoman capital according to familiar distinctions between East and West, yet the city's history and material reality continually destabilized them. Istanbul was the capital of a powerful non-Western empire, but one deeply entangled with European political and cultural history. Rather than treat Istanbul as an exotic setting onto which British writers projected Orientalist fantasies, Pal-Lapinski asks what happened when those writers encountered a city whose complicated histories challenged the categories they brought with them.

Pal-Lapinski's study builds upon an important tradition of scholarship examining nineteenth-century writers' encounters with the Ottoman world, notably Nigel Leask's British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (1992) and Filiz Turhan's The Other Empire: British Romantic Writings about the Ottoman Empire (2004). Yet Pal-Lapinski makes a distinctive contribution by placing the Ottoman Empire's own histories at the center of her literary analysis. Rather than approach Istanbul primarily through the anxieties and aspirations of British observers, she reveals how the inhabitants and institutions of this complex city challenged European assumptions about empire, identity, and modernity.

The first chapter, "The Stones of Constantinople," establishes this method through a striking conjunction of Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, and the Fossati brothers' nineteenth-century restoration of Hagia Sophia. Byzantium here is not simply a vanished precursor to Ottoman Istanbul. Its physical and imaginative remains persist within the nineteenth-century city, complicating European ideas about historical succession, Christianity, Islam, ruins, and modernity. As Pal-Lapinski writes, "Byzantium has a...complicated relationship with visibility. The Byzantine city of Constantinople was continually reimagined, especially in the first half of the nineteenth century, as part of a process of uncovering, restoration, and covering over again" (29). In her analysis of Count Robert of Paris (1831), for example, Pal-Lapinski demonstrates how Scott's novel, which draws from Anna Komnene's The Alexiad (1143-1153), "resurrects" Byzantine Constantinople as a way to illustrate "the Latin West's historical violence against the city as well as the future contemplated dismemberment of the Ottoman empire" (34). Pal-Lapinski's consistent attention to the persistence of the Byzantine past within Ottoman Istanbul becomes one of her most productive motifs. Istanbul contains multiple historical periods, and its monuments make it difficult to narrate a straightforward movement from one civilization to another.

The second chapter turns to Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mozart, and Rossini under the wonderfully suggestive subtitle "The Seductions of Ottoman Sovereignty." Byron is naturally an important figure in a study of British Romantic engagements with the Ottoman world, but Pal-Lapinski resists allowing either him or British Romanticism to monopolize the discussion. Her attention to the political and cultural world of the Ottoman court provides an important counterpoint to European literary representations of imperial sovereignty. The result complicates the conventional opposition between European philhellenism and Ottoman rule. After all, as Pal-Lapinski notes, "[m]ore than any contemporary European royal dynasty (including the Habsburgs) the Ottomans controlled an empire whose complex communities defied nationalism and whose founding moment and geographical center linked the Byzantine and classical past with the Islamic world" (69). In this chapter, Pal-Lapinski is especially good at showing how Ottoman sovereignty fascinated European observers, even as European discourse increasingly represented the Ottoman Empire as despotic, decadent, or historically obsolete. The Ottoman world consequently emerges as something more complicated than the negative space against which European liberalism, nationalism, and philhellenism defined themselves.

This complication of national and cultural identities becomes even more important in the next two chapters, which form some of the book's most rewarding material. Chapter 3, "Champagne and Conversion," centers on Thomas Hope's Anastasius (1819), placing Hope's protagonist within the cosmopolitan and multiethnic environment of the Ottoman Mediterranean. Anastasius-Selim's movements across geographical, religious, sexual, and cultural boundaries make him resistant to precisely the kinds of stable identities that nineteenth-century nationalism increasingly sought to establish: "libertinism, embraced as a philosophy and a way of encountering the Ottoman landscape...leads to a rejection of nationalism and eventually a turning away from Western Europe" (99). Pal-Lapinski's treatment of libertinism is suggestive, as it becomes not merely sexual licence but a form of mobility and self-fashioning, one particularly suited to a protagonist whose identities and affiliations remain remarkably fluid. If you have not read Anastasius, you will want to do so after encountering Pal-Lapinski's analysis.

In Chapter 4, entitled "Janissaries, Dev?irme, Vampirism," the book makes one of its boldest interdisciplinary moves. Through the dev?irme system, Christian boys--chiefly from the Balkans--were taken from their families and converted to Islam before entering Ottoman military service. This system supplied recruits for the janissaries, an elite corps of the Ottoman army. Pal-Lapinski brings these histories into conversation with Balkan folklore and vampirism. What might seem an unlikely constellation of subjects makes for a fascinating argument: vampire stories signal the anxiety surrounding the changing of the Ottoman world "from a cosmopolitan imperial worldview where ethnic affiliations are contingent, to a nationalist moment where ethnic identities become very clearly marked" (133-34). Examining Byron's The Giaour (1813), Prosper Mérimée's La Guzla (1827), and Alexis Tolstoy's La Famille du Vourdalaki (1830s-40s), Pal-Lapinski claims these vampiric texts "reflect the tensions between the emergence of nationalism and the messy communal, religious, and pre-ethnic affiliations of Turkey-in-Europe" (131). The Gothic imagination becomes a means of registering anxieties about the transformation of Ottoman society and the emergence of more rigid national identities. Particularly suggestive is the association between the janissary's separation from his family and the vampire's unsettling return. Pal-Lapinski thus restores vampirism from a merely abstract Gothic trope to a "specific form of violence which arises at this historical juncture in the lands of Rum, continually subject to the creation of new border zones" (134). This is characteristic of Pal-Lapinski's scholarship throughout the book: literary motifs acquire new meanings in their complicated historical contexts.

Julia Pardoe's The City of the Sultan (1837) and The Beauties of the Bosphorus (1838) occupy the fifth chapter. Pardoe's access to female Ottoman spaces challenges familiar assumptions about the harem, while her account of the city reveals a modernizing metropolis still haunted by its Byzantine past. Reading this chapter, one can intuit the great affection Pal-Lapinski has for Pardoe's work. My favorite part of this chapter is Pal-Lapinski's discussion of how, by reading Istanbul through the Gothic sublime, Pardoe acknowledges "the incompleteness of her own gaze" as a visitor to the city (184). I also enjoyed learning about Pardoe's fascination with cisterns, in particular the Basilica Cistern, which recalls Pal-Lapinski's earlier discussion of Byzantium in Constantinople/Istanbul. In this case, the Byzantine city literally survives beneath the Ottoman one. Such spaces make Istanbul's history vertical as much as chronological: the past has not disappeared but remains materially embedded within the modern metropolis.

The Pardoe chapter also crystallizes one of the book's most important questions: what does it actually mean to speak of Istanbul's "Europeanization"? The term seems straightforward only if Europe and the Ottoman Empire are imagined as discrete entities. Istanbul's Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Islamic, Christian, and Jewish histories make that separation difficult to sustain. A city that had for centuries mediated between the Mediterranean, Europe, and Asia cannot suddenly become "European." Pal-Lapinski repeatedly reveals how the language of Europeanization can obscure the complex histories it purports to explain.

The sixth chapter carries these questions into the Victorian period. "Victorian Ottomania" places Disraeli's Tancred (1847) within the political and religious transformations of the nineteenth-century Ottoman world. Pal-Lapinski's attention to the novel's treatment of Jewish identity and Ottoman reform reveals the tensions between Disraeli's imperial imagination and the complex societies he sought to represent. "In Tancred," writes Pal-Lapinski, "Disraeli attempts to create a curious synthesis of Arab-Jewish identity and an alternative version of the Ottoman state controlled by a Europeanized double of the Ottoman sultan. The novel, however, ultimately dramatizes the failure of this project, and traces the disappointing trajectories of both tribal nationalist movements and imperial cosmopolitanism" (196). As in her previous chapters, Pal-Lapinski refuses to reduce the Ottoman Empire to scenery for the development of a British writer. The communities encountered in Tancred inhabit political and cultural histories of their own, and those histories materially affect the novel's treatment of identity, religion, empire, and belonging.

The concluding chapter, centered on Dolmabahçe Palace, brings together the book's concerns with architecture, cosmopolitanism, modernization, and cultural hybridity. European observers attempted to categorize Dolmabahçe through familiar distinctions between Western and Eastern, modern and traditional, European and Ottoman. Yet the palace stubbornly resists such classification. Its architecture incorporates and transforms multiple aesthetic traditions rather than simply documenting the Ottoman Empire's imitation of Europe. Pal-Lapinski makes a similar point about Pera (Beyo?lu). Its supposedly "European" character emerged from interactions among Ottoman subjects, Levantines, Armenians, Jews, Syrians, diplomats, travellers, and others. "Europe" in Istanbul was itself already hybrid.

Reading Istanbul and the Ottoman Empire, I was astonished by the erudition required to produce it. The range of scholarship alone is formidable, but even more impressive is the variety of source types Pal-Lapinski has mastered. Canonical literary works appear alongside less-familiar fiction and travel narratives, unpublished archival materials, memoirs and correspondence, political and diplomatic histories, architecture, urban spaces, monuments, paintings and engravings, interiors, clothing, folklore, religious practices, and material objects. Pal-Lapinski also draws on unpublished archival material concerning Thomas Hope and Julia Pardoe, but archival research is only one component of a much larger scholarly undertaking. The achievement is not simply that Pal-Lapinski has read an enormous amount. She also makes different bodies of knowledge illuminate one another. Architecture changes how literature can be read; Balkan and Ottoman history change the significance of a Gothic motif; Byzantine remains complicate narratives of Ottoman and European modernity; folklore opens unexpected dimensions in canonical Romantic texts. The archive is expansive because the historical world being reconstructed is expansive.

The richness of Pal-Lapinski's study raises questions for future scholarship. If nineteenth-century British writers encountered an Ottoman world that challenged their assumptions about cultural and national identity, how did Ottoman subjects themselves understand and represent these encounters? What might Ottoman Turkish or Greek-language accounts reveal about the ways British visitors were received, interpreted, or challenged? Such questions would extend the dimensions of the reciprocal cultural encounters that Pal-Lapinski effectively reconstructs. They might also illuminate how the confrontations between the cosmopolitan affiliations of Ottoman society and the competing demands of nationalism were negotiated. These are not omissions that diminish Pal-Lapinski's achievement, but possibilities opened up by the extraordinary breadth of her research.

Indeed, Istanbul and the Ottoman Empire demonstrates what can happen when a scholar brings multiple fields into sustained conversation. Romanticism does not abruptly end when Victorianism begins; Ottoman history is not contextual decoration for British literature; Modern Greek history cannot be disentangled neatly from Ottoman history; architecture and material culture are not merely illustrations of literary arguments; and nineteenth-century people, objects, stories, and ideas did not adhere to the disciplinary boundaries through which we now organize them. And yet, within its expansive framework, the book is held together by a coherent intellectual concern: Istanbul's resistance to the binaries imposed upon it. Istanbul consequently becomes more than the geographical center of the study. It becomes a methodological challenge to the ways in which nineteenth-century studies itself has been organized. This is therefore a book that deserves to travel well beyond its most obvious readership. Romanticists and Victorianists will discover new contexts for familiar writers, while scholars of Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies will find their historical fields taken seriously on their own terms.

Istanbul and the Ottoman Empire is, finally, the kind of book that reminds us how ambitious Humanities scholarship can be. Pal-Lapinski's intellectual payoff is commensurate with her labor. Her sources do not merely accumulate but transform one another, unified by a scholarly method capacious enough to do justice to the complexity of her subject. This is precisely the kind of scholarship that deserves recognition and, I would argue, consideration for book prizes. Its extraordinary learning is matched by an intellectual generosity that allows Pal-Lapinski to move beyond the boundaries of her discipline without sacrificing the depth of her analysis. Most important, it models an openness that nineteenth-century studies--and the Humanities more generally--should continue to embrace. Pal-Lapinski has produced not only an important study of Istanbul and the Ottoman Empire but an exemplary demonstration of what becomes possible when scholarship moves beyond and across boundaries.

Alexander Grammatikos is Instructor in English at Langara College, Vancouver (located on unceded Musqueam territory).