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Reading Dante's Stars. Alison Cornish

throughout the book: through it, the colonial object can be "exhaustively explained from its own standpoint as subject," thereby casting "a critical light on the European imperialist project" (221). Likewise, Greene enriches our understanding by casting his own critical light upon colonial uses of lyric. The title of Kenneth Parker's otherwise useful and well-annotated anthology of travel literature seems a misnomer: the Early Modern Tales of Orient assembled here are exclusively narratives by English travellers, despite acknowledgement in the book's introduction of England's relative marginality as colonial power and of the sheer volume of other travellers' accounts translated rapidly into English. Even granting the need for "national" studies, it does seem that the anthology could have been strengthened by including a few representative accounts from other European vantage points (Linschoeten and Pires, for example), both to indicate the scope of the genre, and to indicate the specificity of the English accounts themselves. On the English side, the decision to exclude Sir Thomas Roe's sojourn at the Mughal courts seems odd, as does the tendency to narrow the "Orient" to the Levant and Near East. These criticisms aside, the book is a timely one, especially for teaching purposes: not only does it begin to counter the relative neglect of east-directed early modern colonial accounts, it is also supplemented by concise appendices that lay out factual and biographical information indispensable for classroom use. Parker's introduction is clear, capable, and well-pitched. It briefly sketches the important historical contexts (i.e., geography and cosmology) and delineates the paradigmatic forms ("the terrible Turk," "the staging of Englishness," etc.) through which the "Orient" was thought and experienced. The extracts assembled in the body of the book are also nicely culled and edited, and cover a broad range of concerns.