ABSTRACT
Romantic writers adopted their exotic images from various sources including medieval and Gothic culture and its survival in contemporary folk culture, and the world of ancient Greece or medieval and Renaissance Italy. Percy Bysshe Shelley's comment about Luxima may help us judge the poet's intention in 'Alastor's' desire to recover his dream-companion. Romantic anxieties of empire reach their zenith in the baroque prose writings of Thomas De Quincey, and particularly in the 1821 Confessions of an English Opium Eater. The real pathos of Lord Byron's poem, however, lies in the fate of Medora, and this may have appealed in particular to Byron's female readers, versed in the tragic fate of the abandoned heroine which was typical of the novels of sensibility. Colonization was often symbolized in terms of gender, and as an unsuccessful or unrealized romance between a European male and an oriental female.
