Shelley and the Chaos of History

Shelley and the Chaos of History PDF Author: Hugh Roberts
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271044144
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 549

Get Book Here

Book Description

Shelley and the Chaos of History

Shelley and the Chaos of History PDF Author: Hugh Roberts
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271044144
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 549

Get Book Here

Book Description


Shelley's Intellectual System and its Epicurean Background

Shelley's Intellectual System and its Epicurean Background PDF Author: Michael Vicario
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135860459
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Get Book Here

Book Description
Scholars do not agree on how best to describe Shelley’s philosophical stance. His work has been variously taken to be that of a skeptic or a skeptical and subjective idealist. The study presents a new interpretation of Shelley’s thinking – an interpretation that places ‘intellectual system’ squarely within the Epicurean tradition of Lucretius, casting both poets as theistic empiricists. To establish Shelley as working in the Epicurean tradition, this study explores Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura as edited, translated and interpreted by two Epicurean scholars roughly contemporary with Shelley: Gilbert Wakefield and John Mason Good. These scholars rehabilitated Lucretius by drawing on three major seventeenth-century thinkers, Pierre Gassendi, Ralph Cudworth and Nicholas Malebranche. Like Shelley, each of these thinkers rejected the reduction of philosophy to mechanical and atomistic elements, a reduction which Shelley referred to as ‘materialism’ or ‘popular dualism’. What Shelley rejected is a clue to what he embraced: a fusion of Enlightenment Rationalism with British Empiricism. Such a fusion is the distinguishing mark of the work of Sir William Drummond, the only contemporary philosopher that Shelley consistently praised. This is the tradition within which Shelley ultimately stands – one that brings into balance what is given to the mind a priori and what the mind creates.

The Unfamiliar Shelley

The Unfamiliar Shelley PDF Author: Timothy Webb
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351880780
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 419

Get Book Here

Book Description
Stimulated by new editions of Shelley's writings and the evidence of notebooks, the editors have assembled an outstanding group of international Shelley scholars to work through the implications of recent advances in scholarship. With particular attention to texts that have been neglected or underestimated, the contributors consider many important aspects of Shelley's prolific and remarkably diverse output, including the verse letter, plays, prose essays, satire, pamphlets, political verse, romance, prefaces, translations from the Greek, prose style, artistic representations, fragments and early writings. Revaluations of Shelley's youthful works, often criticized for their over-exuberance, pay dividends as they reveal Shelley's early maturation as a writer and also shed light on his later achievement. Taken as a whole, the collection makes evident that Shelley's reputation has been based largely on surprisingly imperfect and incomplete edited publications, driven by Victorian taste and culture. A writer very different from the one we thought we knew emerges from these essays, which are sure to inspire more reappraisals of Shelley's work.

Shelley's Visual Imagination

Shelley's Visual Imagination PDF Author: Nancy Moore Goslee
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139936697
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Get Book Here

Book Description
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 Revolutionary Sublime

Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime PDF Author: Cian Duffy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521854008
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Get Book Here

Book Description
Offering a genuinely fresh set of perspectives on Shelley's texts and contexts, Cian Duffy argues that Shelley's engagement with the British and French discourse on the sublime had a profound influence on his writing about political change in that age of revolutionary crisis. Examining Shelley's extensive use of sublime imagery and metaphor, Duffy offers not only a substantial reassessment of Shelley's work but also a significant re-appraisal of the sublime's role in the cultural history of Britain during the Romantic period as well as Shelley's fascination with natural phenomena.

Sweet Science

Sweet Science PDF Author: Amanda Jo Goldstein
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022645858X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Get Book Here

Book Description
Today we do not expect poems to carry scientifically valid information. But it was not always so. In Sweet Science, Amanda Jo Goldstein returns to the beginnings of the division of labor between literature and science to recover a tradition of Romantic life writing for which poetry was a privileged technique of empirical inquiry. Goldstein puts apparently literary projects, such as William Blake’s poetry of embryogenesis, Goethe’s journals On Morphology, and Percy Shelley’s “poetry of life,” back into conversation with the openly poetic life sciences of Erasmus Darwin, J. G. Herder, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Such poetic sciences, Goldstein argues, share in reviving Lucretius’s De rerum natura to advance a view of biological life as neither self-organized nor autonomous, but rather dependent on the collaborative and symbolic processes that give it viable and recognizable form. They summon De rerum natura for a logic of life resistant to the vitalist stress on self-authorizing power and to make a monumental case for poetry’s role in the perception and communication of empirical realities. The first dedicated study of this mortal and materialist dimension of Romantic biopoetics, Sweet Science opens a through-line between Enlightenment materialisms of nature and Marx’s coming historical materialism.

Secular Mysteries: Stanley Cavell and English Romanticism

Secular Mysteries: Stanley Cavell and English Romanticism PDF Author: Edward T. Duffy
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441186476
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Get Book Here

Book Description
Stanley Cavell and English Romanticism serves as both introduction to Cavell for Romanticists, and to the larger question of what philosophy means for the reading of literature, as well as to the importance and relevance of Romantic literature to Cavell's thought. Illustrated through close readings of Wordsworth and Shelley, and extended discussions of Emerson and Thoreau as well as Cavell, Duffy proposes a Romanticism of persisting cultural relevance and truly trans-Atlantic scope. The turn to romanticism of America's most distinguished "ordinary-language" philosopher is shown to be tied to the neo-Romantic claim that far from being merely an illustrator of the truths discovered by philosophy, poetry is its equal partner in the instituting of knowledge. This book will be vital reading for anyone interested in Romanticism, Stanley Cavell and the ever-deepening connections between literature and philosophy.

Novel Histories

Novel Histories PDF Author: Lisa Kasmer
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611474957
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 199

Get Book Here

Book Description
Novel Histories: British Women Writing History, 1760-1830 explores issues of historical and literary genres, historiography, and the gendering of civic and literary roles. It demonstrates the new and sometimes subversive ways that women authors pushed the limits of writing history in order to participate in contemporary national civic life otherwise closed to them.

The Politics of Aesthetics

The Politics of Aesthetics PDF Author: Marc Redfield
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804747509
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book suggests that modern cultural and critical institutions have persistently associated questions of aesthetics and politics with literature, theory, technics, and Romanticism. Its first section examines aesthetic nationalism and the figure of the body, focusing on writings by Benedict Anderson, J. G. Fichte, and Matthew Arnold, and arguing that uneasy acts of aestheticization (of media technology) and abjection (of the maternal body) undergird the production of the national body as “imagined community.” Subsequent chapters on Paul de Man, Friedrich Schlegel, and Percy Shelley explore the career of the gendered body in the aesthetic tradition and the relationship among aesthetics, technics, politics, and figurative language. The author accounts for the hysteria that has characterized media representations of theory, explains why and how Romanticism has remained a locus of extravagant political hopes and anxieties, and, in a sequence of close readings, uncovers the “anaesthetic” condition of possibility of the politics of aesthetics.

Poetics and the Gift

Poetics and the Gift PDF Author: Adam R. Rosenthal
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474488404
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Get Book Here

Book Description
Using a broad, comparative approach, this study shows how the figure of the gift structures poetic discourse and does so from the age of Homer up through twenty-first century conceptual poetics. Beginning from a new interpretation of Derrida’s writings on the gift, Adam R. Rosenthal argues that this ambivalent figure names at one and the same time poetry’s most extreme aneconomic privilege and the point of its closest contact with the interested exchange of the market. In this way, the gift conducts material relays of patronage and theories of poetic origination, in genius, inspiration, and imagination. Poetics and the Gift capitalizes on this double function in order to read material historical accounts of poetry alongside philosophical and poetic ones. By way of his original reading of Derrida’s work in Given Time and ‘Economimesis’, Rosenthal offers a novel account of ‘gift poetics’ and a new understanding of what makes poetry ‘poetry’.