Shelley’s Revolt in the Mediterranean: Writing Restoration

The geopolitics of Shelley’s Laon and Cythna and The Revolt of Islam revolve around its half-mythical, half-historical Mediterranean setting. Centred in Argolis and the Golden City, the poem’s geography is a translation both of the clashing forces that shaped the French Revolution in the 1790s and of the mount- ing tensions between Greece and Turkey in the 1810s. It also references a broader Continental panorama of imperial–national struggles instigated by the restoration process decreed by the Congress of Vienna. Throwing light on Shelley’s engagement with Restoration-era politics, this essay reads the poem’s geogra- phy and recursive narrative structure as thematic-formal vehicles for reflecting on the Napoleonic aftermath as another episode in the unending conflict between freedom and ‘anarchy’ that the poet saw as the core engine of universal history.