“This is a sophisticated exploration of the complex and often contradictory elements of nation-building and identity-formation in Georgia in the second half of the nineteenth century. Manning, has an extraordinary understanding of the subtleties of Georgian writing. Drawing on Gerogian newspapers, poetry, and short stories, and focusing on Georgia’s encounters with Europe, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire, he weaves together a complex challenge to the familiar Western tropes of the imagined community. Manning has produced a novel theoretical contribution to our ideas about the role of intellectuals in national identity formation.”
Stephen F. Jones ". . . 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’"
Julie A. Christensen
Slavic and East European Journal, 58.2 (Summer 2014)