Paper Proposal Shelley S Generic History

Crowell 1

Ken Crowell

ENGL – 547

Dr. Felluga

17 October 2007

Paper Proposal – Shelley’s Generic History

In a brief notation in her journal during the year 1819, four days after Percy Bysshe Shelley’s

27th birthday, Mary Shelley details the events of the day: “read the Bible - write – S reads the

Alchemist out aloud – he finishes his tragedy.” The Alchemist is Ben Johnson’s comedy; what

Mary Shelley is writing is the work that would become Mathilda; and Percy Shelley has just finished The Cenci: A Tragedy in Five Acts. Rather than being a coincidental bit of trivia, this instance is exemplary, and an integral part of the circumstances of production of Percy Shelley’s tragedy, which I intend to examine.

The Cenci is a drama perhaps best viewed as a text folded over itself. Shelley bends genre, time, and source inspiration to create a work of multiple significance. Thus the intersection of a closet performance of a Johnson satire, Mary Shelley’s initial foray into examination of incestuous relationships, and the completion of Percy Shelley’s reworking of historical legend into tragedy marks a particular type of node that consistently refigures throughout the history of this complex text’s production. The result of this production is a text that some would label generically “unstable.”

However, my goal with this paper is to counter such a claim of instability by explication of these nodes of production through close reading: of primary source material surrounding the writing of The Cenci, of Shelly’s philosophy as he presents it through his primary prose and poetic works, and of the text proper of The Cenci. The purpose of such explication is toward a Crowell 2 more fundamental material understanding of how Shelley saw this drama as a purposeful, rather than unstable, generic intervention, at a specific historical moment, that consciously highlighted the fact of generic and textual mutability and instability.

While my critical method is primarily a meticulous analysis of manuscript and epistolary material coupled with a sympathetic reading of the three 1819 to 1820 dramas Prometheus

Unbound, Swellfoot the Tyrant, and The Cenci, this method is both framed and augmented by attention to Foucault’s analysis of competing 19th c. texts in I Pierre Rivière. It is clear that much of what Foucault identified concerning the peculiar nature of discourses in the 19th c. Shelley also sought to analyze by doing his own historical analysis of the truth of “the word” as it was manifest in his own control group, the renaissance family of the Cencis. Because of this, an application of Foucauldian analysis is particularly suitable to Shelley’s work.

Rather than being simply a historical reading of a historical reading, though, my paper remains a reading of the history and historicity of genre through a work whose generic complexities and primary place in the understanding of both drama and poetry has been long neglected. There is no reason that it is Ozymandias—an enthymeme precursor to The Cenci,

Shelley’s thesis on the vagaries of genre—that is the more recognized work. Or rather, there is a reason and it is genre.

I intend to use analysis of genre to prove The Cenci as a fourfold watershed. It marks a historical moment of economic insecurity in a variety of genres; it marks a moment of particular insecurity and instability within the Shelley circle, but it also marks Shelley’s security in his application of his semiotic philosophy to poetic explication of the instability of hegemonic sign systems such as the politically charged historical narrative of the Cenci family. Finally, The

Cenci is a test case for a form of literary criticism that is at once formalist and material: personal Crowell 3 and historical: and both archival and theoretical. Thus while the form of The Cenci is mixed—in part due to historical nodes such as the explosion of literary styles on that summer day in

Leghorn—and critical concerns in my explication of The Cenci are varied—in part because my work attempts an intervention in the history of a work and of a critical mode—I hope to establish both of these blendings of genre as a necessary to our future understanding of a monumental work of the Romantic period. Crowell 4

Annotated Bibliography

Baldini, Cajsa C. The Cenci Unbound: An Annotated Contextual Edition With Hypertext. Diss. Arizona State U, 2005.

What should prove to be an important work in Shelley studies, Baldini's effort to publish a hypertext version of The Cenci is quite explicitly informed by Jerome McGann's foundational work Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web. However, and perhaps more importantly for those who would privilege Shelley as not just a poet but a quite astute philosopher of literature, Baldini's version of Shelley's drama is also informed by Shelley's own ideas about textual mutability in his "Defense of Poetry." Essentially, this version of The Cenci answers Shelley's call to let his poetry exist in what Bakhtin would call "great time." It is useful for my own study in its concern for Shelley's concerns about genre.

Bates, Ernest Sutherland. A Study of Shelley's Drama, The Cenci. New York: Columbia UP, 1908.

While this critical examination of Shelley's drama does suffer from the effects of age, it remains as one of only a small handful of book-length critical works devoted strictly to The Cenci. In addition, this inquiry rivals even that of Curran's Scorpions Ringed with Fire in its useful and logical explication of the work. In fact, while Curran's work is the standard text in the field of Shelley studies, it could be seen as simply a response to Bates' study, which at the time of Curran's publication was the only existing exhaustive account of Shelley's drama. This work is primarily useful for my own as a way to study the genealogy of Shelley criticism.

Beyle, Marie-Henri (Stendahl). "The Cenci." Five Short Novels of Stendhal. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff. New York: Double Day, 1958. 161-204.

The Stendhal version of the Cenci family saga is instructive for a close reading of Shelley's work because of the similarity of circumstance in production between the two. Both texts are "political," written by political expatriates to Italy from war-time imperial nations. Also similar is the extent to which both authors were explicitly engaged with the politics of genre when authoring these re-writings of what was already a public narrative. Both accounts are framed, and given in a consciously mixed style, and thinking about the extent that the materiality of the "Italian experience" informs this mixing is central to my own examination of the drama. Crowell 5

Bieri, James. Percy Bysshe Shelley a Biography: Exile of Unfulfilled Reknown, 1816-1822. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005.

Bieri's recent biographical narrative of Shelley's exile in Italy is significant in its favor of a meticulous analysis of a manageable time-period over a more generalized portrait of a whole life. The work is an exemplary instance of scholarship that dwells on the quotidian in order to make it phenomenal. Events in the lives of the Shelleys (and a compendium of such events are related) take on in this work both a mythic and material significance, the kind of significance which one might assume such events had for the Shelley family. Because of this, Bieri's work, while adhering to no specific school of criticism, is a materialist and psychological study as well as simply a biography. The sections on Shelley's composition process between Rome and Leghorn are vitally important for my work on the material and generic considerations surrounding Shelley's production of The Cenci.

Bruhn, Mark J. ''Prodigious Mixtures and Confusions Strange:" The Self-subverting Mixed Style of The Cenci.' Poetics Today. 22 (2001): 713-763.

Bruhn's project is to place Shelley as a central node in the understanding of the history of the dramatic form in English by arguing The Cenci as looking both backwards to antiquity and forwards to modernist drama. Bruhn argues that the way Shelley creates this Janis-drama is through a form-consciousness that creates both intra- and extra-textual philosophical meta- critique within the dialogue. This fairly recent article highlights a growing tendency towards seeing Shelley as a very conscious artisan whose politics inform his genre in noteworthy ways.

Curran, Stewart. Shelley's Cenci: Scorpions Ringed with Fire. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970.

This is the book length study within Shelley criticism, which is disheartening if we consider that the text is approaching its 40th anniversary. However, as an account of The Cenci's critical reception, its allusions and resonances, its structure, and its various successful stage productions, Curran's work still proves valuable in the attempt to place Shelley's work into a more up to date critical framework. While not everything a critic would need from a serious study of a major work by a major writer, similar to the way in which Curran had to contend with the work of Bates by default, current and future Shelley scholars must take the work of Curran into account when engaging with The Cenci.

---. "Shelley and the end(s) of Ideology." Shelley's Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2002.

Perhaps this essay could more properly be called "Shelley and the ends of Signification." Curran's attempt here is to read Shelley's major works for their representation of a sustained Crowell 6 philosophical interest and their grapplings with the implications of hegemony. Curran, through a remarkably compact style of blending materialist concerns and close reading, shows a consistency in Shelley's thought that has been obscured through the effects of contingencies within his life and the problems of his reading public on his art. The picture Curran gives, following in the tradition of William Keach's Shelley's Style, is of a self-aware philosophical mind that eventually develops his analysis of hegemony into a distrust even of language and other sign systems. Curran gives significant attention to how The Cenci figures in this development from proto-political philosopher to proto-semiologist. As grounded as this work is in the historical, it becomes very useful for my own analysis of the contingency of Shelley's genres.

Foucault, Michel. I Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother…: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century. Ed. Michel Foucault. Trans. Frank Jellinik. New York: Pantheon Books, 1975.

Foucault and his research partners present here a working historical analysis of the cultural interplay between texts and act operating around the event of a premeditated 19th. C. parricide. At stake is not the "true account," but rather the account of the invested powers who try to create the true and their interplay of competing signification. As a look into the disciplining of "truth" and the manipulability of systems of thought in the early nineteenth century, this text is very instructive for examining the ideas of "text" that Shelley was so conscious of as he was writing his tragedy.

Gladden, Samuel. "Shelley's Agenda Writ Large: Reconsidering 'Oedipus Tyrannus; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant.'" Reading Shelley's Interventionist Poetry, 1819 – 1820. Ed. Michael Scrivener. Romantic Circles Praxis Series. October 2001.

This essay takes a serious look at a neglected work in the Shelley canon, examining the relations between "Swellfoot's" genre, Shelley's philosophy, and the historical moment of the Queen Caroline affair. While shorter, and lacking an expansive critical apparatus, it does raise pertinent questions about whether the dramatic work of Shelley was an attempt at an intervention in his own flawed system of thought. While my own work is focused on the The Cenci, any study examining a Shelley play that inverted and subverted the classic tragedy, making out of it a satyr play appropriate for a current political controversy, should prove very useful for my own analyses of genre.

Shelley, Mary. The Journals of Mary Shelley: 1814 – 1844. Ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. Crowell 7

Mary Shelley's journals are especially useful for examining the historical instance of the production of Shelley's tragedy. Perhaps more than any biography, lines from the journals such as "read the Bible - write – S reads the Alchemist [drama by Ben Johnson] out loud – he finishes his tragedy," give an extremely instructive glimpse into the mind and life of Shelley as he creates The Cenci.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "Cenci, the." Shelley's Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2002.

This major text in the Shelley canon is the primary subject of my paper. With a few notable exceptions, what work there is on this tragedy is oddly deficient in its critical scope. I intend to read this work through both current critical lenses and against primary source material surrounding its production. While my focus is on genre and historicity, I hope to accomplish the supplementary goal of promoting The Cenci as a work ripe for explication and reassessment via a variety of current critical methods as well.

---. "A Defence of Poetry." Shelley's Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2002.

This is perhaps the clearest statement of Shelley's artistic philosophy from the actual source. While it is useful as a tool for looking at all of his poetry, it is especially instructive when applied to The Cenci because of its attention to the poet's place in making sense out of the mutability of fact and language.

---. Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the. 2 vols. Ed. Frederick L. Jones. New York: Clarendon, 1964.

This edition of Shelley's correspondence provides a manageable alternative to the voluminous work, Shelley and his Circle. I am mostly concerned with volume two of this work: Shelley's correspondence in and from Italy. My current critical focus is on close reading of primary texts combined with critical reading of the epistolary material surrounding production and for this reason, Shelley's Italian letters are critically important to my work.

---. "Prometheus Unbound." Shelley's Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2002.

Prometheus Unbound is significant to explication of The Cenci for many reasons. First on this list is its position as the most well-known of Shelley's dramatic works. Second, it was written at approximately the same time as The Cenci (Shelley actually interrupted the writing of Prometheus to pen The Cenci). And finally, many of Shelley's stylistic and thematic concerns Crowell 8 seem to persist between the two works even though at first glance they seem shockingly different; both are genre bending works concerned primarily with freedom and oppression. Understanding The Cenci necessarily entails understanding the historical moment that caused both these texts and for my work this begins by examining these two major works' textual correspondences.

---. "Oedipus Tyrannus; Or, Swellfoot the Tyrant." The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928. 2:317-350.

This is the third in Shelley's series of genre-conscious dramas and definitely that which has had the least critical attention devoted to it. My intent is to use this slightly later work as a new lens with which to examine the slightly more canonical Cenci.