<em>“. . . The book promises to play a key role in the further development of Caucasian and Georgian studies, and it opens new territories for exploration and investigation by a hopefully expanded reading public or ‘imagined community of scholars.’ Particularly relevant here, Manning makes a major contribution by demonstrating how Georgians themselves put together many familiar tropes about the Caucasus stemming from the Russian ‘geopoetic and geopolitics’ of Romantic poetry and literature, including the ‘imperial sublime’ and the feminization of Orthodox Georgia as the ‘oriental beauty’.”</em><b><br />— Julie A. Christensen, George Mason University, in the Slavic and East European Journal, 58.2 (Summer 2014)</b>