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In the opening pages of Uncanny Encounters, John Zilcosky's study of the preconditions that led to the birth of the uncanny, the elements that shaped it, and its current life, there is a story about maps: the author's fascination with them as a young boy, his preference for the “wondrous” kind, before modernity's insistence on a great divide between fiction and reality, maps like that of Odysseus's travels, Babylonian maps, medieval maps that depicted the Garden of Eden far to the East, past the Ganges delta. This ongoing fascination is what led him to discover later, as a teenager, that he did not have to go too far back in history to find the inviting incompletion that so drew him; that even in the nineteenth century there were “white spots in maps” all the more to encourage new scientific expeditions and intrepid travellers (p. 6). What he also discovered at this time, however, was that in a period of twenty years in the late nineteenth century all these spaces were “filled in” as “abruptly and irrevocably, the earth came into relief” (p. 8). “This unique historical moment,” he writes, linking a childhood fascination with his academic work, “led to the pressing question of my book: How did this apparently final mapping of the earth affect the European imagination? How did Europeans' fantasies about themselves and their world change when these apparently virgin territories disappeared?” (p. 9)
Zilcosky's answer to these questions becomes the premise which informs all his readings in the book: “As I discovered while reading travel writing from around 1900, Europeans experienced this new global world as a shocking series of ‘uncanny encounters.’” “At the ends of the earth,” he explains, “they found not primitive savages but ‘civilized’ natives or, even worse, European dopplegängers … as a frightening surprise” (p. 9). “[F]in de siècle European, especially German, travelers,” he continues, also specifying his book's area of study, “were … always discovering Europe eve