Imageless Truths

Imageless Truths
Author: Karen A. Weisman
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2016-11-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1512808857

In Imageless Truths, Karen A. Weisman offers a new reading of Shelley's work in the context of the poet's changing constructions of poetic fictions. Shelley's understanding of language in general, and of the fictions and their rhetorical trope in particular, evolved throughout his career, and Weisman argues that it is in his self-consciousness over these transformations that we can find the primary motivating factor in the poet's philosophical and literary development. Weisman discerns in Shelley an ongoing quest for a mode of fiction-making that can accommodate both the poet's belief in a "metaphysical ultimate" and his anxiety over the implications of grounding poetic fictions too firmly in the details of everyday life. If Shelley's awareness of fictionality is a major element in the poetry, it is an awareness that comes with the troubled sense of the limits of fiction. Weisman contents that it is this persistent, double-edged anxiety that distinguishes Shelley from the other English Romantics. Her point is not intended to deny the validity or the continuing relevance of the deconstructionist perspective, nor the value of its various claims for Shelley; she is simply concerned that the instability of poetic fictions was eventually perceived as a "given" by Shelley, as the beginning premise which he acknowledged and then tried to move beyond. Imageless Truths will be of interest to students and scholars of English literature.

Romantic Localities

Romantic Localities
Author: Christoph Bode
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2015-10-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317324307

Romantic Localities explores the ways in which Romantic-period writers of varying nationalities responded to languages, landscapes – both geographical and metaphorical – and literatures.

Shelley's Visual Imagination

Shelley's Visual Imagination
Author: Nancy Moore Goslee
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2011-06-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139936697

Shelley's drafts and notebooks, which have recently been published for the first time, are very revealing about the creative processes behind his poems, and show - through illustrations and doodles - an unexpectedly vivid visual imagination which contributed greatly to the effect of his poetry. Shelley's Visual Imagination analyzes both verbal script and visual sketches in his manuscripts to interpret the lively personifications of concepts such as 'Liberty', 'Anarchy', or 'Life' in his completed poems. Challenging the persistent assumption that Shelley's poetry in particular, and Romantic poetry more generally, reject the visual for expressive voice or music, this first full-length study of the drafts and notebooks combines criticism with a focus upon bibliographic codes and iconic pages. The product of years of close examination of these remarkable texts, this much-anticipated book will be of great value for all students of Shelley and all those interested in the Romantic process of creation.

Shelley and the Romantic Imagination

Shelley and the Romantic Imagination
Author: Thomas R. Frosch
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2007
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780874139785

"Frosch offers a fuller psychoanalytic account of Shelley's poetry than previously available, discussing both oedipal and pre-oedipal conflict, the positive and negative attitudes toward both the father and the mother, and the subtle workings, defensive and creative, of the ego."--Jacket.

The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley
Author: Percy Bysshe Shelley
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 1149
Release: 2012-07-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1421411091

Winner of the 2013 Richard J. Finneran Award, Society for Textual ScholarshipOutstanding Academic Title, Choice "His name is Percy Bysshe Shelley, and he is the author of a poetical work entitled Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude.” With these words, the radical journalist and poet Leigh Hunt announced his discovery in 1816 of an extraordinary talent within “a new school of poetry rising of late.” The third volume of the acclaimed edition of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley includes Alastor, one of Shelley’s first major works, and all the poems that Shelley completed, for either private circulation or publication, during the turbulent years from 1814 to March 1818: Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, Mont Blanc, Laon and Cythna, as well as shorter pieces, such as his most famous sonnet, Ozymandias. It was during these years that Shelley, already an accomplished and practiced poet with three volumes of published verse, authored two major volumes, earned international recognition, and became part of the circle that was later called the Younger Romantics. As with previous volumes, extensive discussions of the poems’ composition, influences, publication, circulation, reception, and critical history accompany detailed records of textual variants for each work. Among the appendixes are Mary W. Shelley’s 1839 notes on the poems for these years, a table of the forty-two revisions made to Laon and Cythna for its reissue as The Revolt of Islam, and Shelley’s errata list for the same. It is in the works included in this volume that the recognizable and characteristic voice of Shelley emerges—unmistakable, consistent, and vital.

Poetics of Self and Form in Keats and Shelley

Poetics of Self and Form in Keats and Shelley
Author: Mark Sandy
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351910663

Beginning with a reassessment of contemporary romantic studies, this book provides a modern critical comparison of Keats and Shelley. The study offers detailed close readings of a variety of literary genres (including the romance, lyric, elegy and literary fragment) adopted by Keats and Shelley to explore their poetic treatment of self and form. The poetic careers of Keats and Shelley embrace a tragic affirmation of those darker elements latent in the earlier writings to meditate on their own posthumous reception and reputation. Fresh readings of Keats and Shelley show how they conceive of the self as fictional and anticipate Nietzsche's modern theories of subjectivity. Nietzsche's conception of the subject as a site of conflicting fictions usefully measures this emergent sense of poetic self and form in Keats and Shelley. This Nietzschean perspective enriches our appreciation of the considerable artistic achievement of these two significant second-generation romantic poets.

Epic

Epic
Author: Herbert F. Tucker
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 748
Release: 2012-11-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0199232997

Literary history has conventionally viewed Milton as the last real practitioner of the epic in English verse. Herbert Tucker's spirited book shows that the British tradition of epic poetry was unbroken from the French Revolution to World War I.

Shelley Among Others

Shelley Among Others
Author: Stuart Peterfreund
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2002
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780801867514

This is a comprehensive reading of Shelley's oeuvre through the lens of developments in literary and psychoanalytic theory. The author provides though-provoking readings of well-known works and also explores less familiar pieces.

Strange Truths in Undiscovered Lands

Strange Truths in Undiscovered Lands
Author: Nahoko Miyamoto Alvey
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2009-04-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1442690569

The great Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley had a complicated relationship with the British Empire and the culture of colonialism. Considered politically radical and scandalous in Britain, Shelley lived in self-imposed exile and set much of his writing in foreign places. In Strange Truths in Undiscovered Lands Nahoko Miyamoto Alvey examines the ways in which Shelley developed a 'Romantic geography' to provide visionary alternatives to an earth devastated by a new type of European colonialism and global expansion. Intertextually rich, Alvey's work establishes the context in which poems by Shelley and other Romantics were written by presenting relevant histories, travel texts, scientific writings, and archival material, and are all complemented by postcolonial analysis. Unique in its emphasis on the optimistic and positive aspects of Shelley's poetical works, Strange Truths in Undiscovered Lands offers a different perspective on Romantic Orientalism, and a new look at how the poet imagined the relationship between the Self and the Other. Thorough and original, this book will be of interest to Romanticists, postcolonialists, and anyone interested in alternative responses to acts of colonialism and empire.

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley
Author: John Worthen
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 506
Release: 2019-02-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1118533968

Drawing especially on the many scholarly discoveries of recent years, this biography examines the life – and death ‒ of one of the greatest Romantic poets. Based on sceptical historical investigation and featuring an in-depth look at Shelley’s personal, financial and familial situation, it builds a compelling narrative about a controversial writer and thinker whose personal and philosophical convictions caused much turmoil during his short yet extraordinarily influential life. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley reveals sides of the author not often studied. It looks at Shelley as an intensely loving, thoughtful and responsible man and father, who (except in one case) took exemplary care of the women he loved and who fell in love with him. It shows how significant his status as a gentleman was; it examines his poetry, letters, notebooks and discursive prose so that readers can comprehend the most important concerns of his life; it explores the financial and medical grounds for his years of exile; it is also the first biography to take account of his recently discovered early long poem the Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things. This biography offers readers a unique look at a famous poet, scholar, gentleman, democrat, atheist and tragic icon of English Romanticism.