DOCSLIB.ORG

2. Anthropocene Temporalities and British Romantic Poetry Evan Gottlieb

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
2. Anthropocene Temporalities and British Romantic Poetry Evan Gottlieb L Romanticism and Time EDITED BY SOPHIE LANIEL-MUSITELLI AND CÉLINE SABIRON ANIEL -M Romanticism and Time This brilliantly conceived, exhilarating, and wide-ranging collection of essays is essential reading for all those interested in taking the long view of the historical, literary, and USITELLI philosophical times of British Romanticism. Literary Temporalities Pamela Clemitt, Queen Mary, University of London Romanticism and Time is a remarkable affirmation of border-crossings and international AND EDITED BY SOPHIE LANIEL-MUSITELLI AND CÉLINE SABIRON exchanges in many ways. This major collection of essays represents the work of eminent scholars from France, Germany, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, the United Kingdom, and the S United States, as they in turn represent the Romanticisms that emerged not only from the ABIRON “four nations” of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland but also from Continental Europe and America. With their commitment to diversity, to change, and to exchange, and because of their awareness of the romanticism of periodization itself, the authors in this volume ( produce, as Wordsworth might say, a “timely utterance.” EDS ) Kevis Goodman, University of California, Berkeley This volume considers Romantic poetry as embedded in and reflecting on the march R of time, regarding it not merely as a reaction to the course of events between the late- eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, but also as a form of creative engagement with history in the making. Revising current thinking about periodisation, these essays survey the Romantic canon’s evolution over time and approach Romanticism as a phenomenon unfolding across national borders. As with all Open Book publica� ons, this en� re book is available to read for free on the OMANTICISM publisher’s website. Printed and digital edi� ons, together with supplementary digital material, can also be found at www.openbookpublishers.com Cover Image: J.M.W Turner, Ancient Italy - Ovid Banished from Rome (1838). Cover Design by Anna Ga� . AND T IME book eebook and OA edi� ons also available OPEN ACCESS OBP https://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2021 Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Céline Sabiron. Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapter’s author. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Céline Sabiron (eds), Romanticism and Time. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0232 Copyright and permissions for the reuse of many of the images included in this publication differ from the above. This information is provided in the captions and in the list of illustrations. In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https:// doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0232#copyright. Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://doi. org/10.11647/OBP.0232#resources Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. This book has been published with the support of the Institut Universitaire de France. Univ. Lille, ULR 4O74—CECILLE—Centre d’Études en Civilisations, Langues et Lettres Étrangères, F-59000 Lille, France. ISBN Paperback: 978-1-80064-071-9 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-80064-072-6 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-80064-073-3 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-80064-074-0 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-80064-075-7 ISBN Digital (XML): 978-1-80064-076-4 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0232 Cover Image: J.M.W Turner, Ancient Italy—Ovid Banished from Rome (1838). Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Turner_Ovid_Banished_from_Rome.jpg. Cover Design by Anna Gatti. 2. Anthropocene Temporalities and British Romantic Poetry Evan Gottlieb As Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued, the dawning of the Anthropocene has created not only tangible environmental and political effects, but also has threatened to alter our traditionally anthropocentric sense of time, which (following Quentin Meillassoux) I dub “correlationist time.” Although these alterations feel novel, however, evidence of temporality’s malleability can be traced back at least to the British Romantics, who like us were navigating uncharted waters, politically as well as ecologically. After outlining the modern Western consolidation of “correlationist time” and locating its representational epitome in some early poetry of William Wordsworth, I sketch four alternatives to “correlationist time” limned by other British Romantics poets: deep time (Charlotte Smith, Percy Shelley); slow time (Keats), revolutionary time (Shelley again), and hyper-Chaotic time (Byron). According to Reinhart Koselleck’s influential formulation, the defining experience of modernity has been acceleration. Combined with what he calls a new sense of an ‘open future’, Koselleck argues that this privileging of progress and novelty has been the reigning temporality since the late eighteenth century.1 Although this thesis clearly takes its cues from the Industrial Revolution’s speeding up of socio-political and economic processes, it neglects to consider the environmental impacts that have today become (nearly) impossible to ignore.2 This oversight 1 Reinhart Koselleck, ‘The Eighteenth Century as the Beginning of Modernity’, in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. by Todd Samuel Presner and others (Stanford: Stanford University Press , 2002), p. 165. 2 I say ‘(nearly) impossible to ignore’ because some governments, political parties, industries, corporations, and other entities remain all too eager to deny, downplay, © Evan Gottlieb, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0232.02 26 Romanticism and Time is symptomatic not just of Koselleck’s scholarly milieu but also of the fact that the transition from older (feudal) modes of historical thinking to newer, modern ones nevertheless retained a basic assumption: that human temporalities are largely divorced from planetary ones.3 Indeed, the carry-over from earlier eras, which generally held nature to be at best a passive backdrop for human activity, and at worst a stubborn obstacle to be overcome by human ingenuity and industry, arguably lies behind capitalist modernity’s penchant for treating the natural world primarily as a resource to be exploited. But in the time of the Anthropocene, this pretence is now untenable, at least for those of us who, following Bruno Latour, are ready to admit that ‘we [have] shifted from a mere ecological crisis into what should instead be called a profound mutation in our relation to the world’.4 This mutation takes many forms, to be sure, and Dipesh Chakrabarty identifies its temporal dimension in his formative 2009 article, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, where he observes that ‘anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history […]. A fundamental assumption of Western (and now universal) political thought has come undone in this crisis’.5 The assumption to which Chakrabarty alludes, moreover, is as basic as it is increasingly uncertain: ‘that our past, present, and future are connected by a certain continuity of human experience’.6 Such continuity seemed to be guaranteed both by the supposed distinction (retained by Koselleck’s accelerated modernity) between human and planetary history, and modernity’s imagined triumph of the former over the latter: precisely the two postulates that the Anthropocene threatens to disprove with increasing violence, as Chakrabarty demonstrated more than a decade ago. or otherwise distract from the realities of global warming. 3 This is not to deny that strands of philosophical thinking have long proposed various connections between our sense of time and our geophysical situatedness as upright bipedals; for a fascinating meditation on such theories, see Thomas Moynihan, Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History (Windsor Quarry, Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2019). 4 Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. by Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), p. 8. 5 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009), 197–222 (pp. 201, 207), https://doi.org/10.1086/596640 6 Ibid. 2. Anthropocene Temporalities and British Romantic Poetry 27 Chakrabarty posits this development as new because, like many historians, he largely sees the Anthropocene itself as a relatively new affair. But there are good reasons to recogniseanthropocenic effects beginning much earlier than ‘the Great Acceleration’ of the post-World- War-II period or even the Industrial Revolution; humans have been systematically altering our environments, after all, since the dawn of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent some 10,000 years ago. Moreover— and more to the point in this chapter, which will argue for William Wordsworth’s poetry as the norm of Romantic-era
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Systemic Thought and Subjectivity in Percy Bysshe Shelley's Poetry
    Systemic Thought and Subjectivity in Percy Bysshe Shelley‟s Poetry Sabrina Palan Systemic Thought and Subjectivity in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Poetry Diplomarbeit zur Erlangung eines akademischen Grades einer Magistra der Philosophie an der Karl- Franzens Universität Graz vorgelegt von Sabrina PALAN am Institut für Anglistik Begutachter: Ao.Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr.phil. Martin Löschnigg Graz, 2017 1 Systemic Thought and Subjectivity in Percy Bysshe Shelley‟s Poetry Sabrina Palan Eidesstattliche Erklärung Ich erkläre an Eides statt, dass ich die vorliegende Arbeit selbstständig und ohne fremde Hilfe verfasst, andere als die angegebenen Quellen nicht benutzt und die den benutzen Quellen wörtlich oder inhaltlich entnommenen Stellen als solche kenntlich gemacht habe. Überdies erkläre ich, dass dieses Diplomarbeitsthema bisher weder im In- noch im Ausland in irgendeiner Form als Prüfungsarbeit vorgelegt wurde und dass die Diplomarbeit mit der vom Begutachter beurteilten Arbeit übereinstimmt. Sabrina Palan Graz, am 27.02.2017 2 Systemic Thought and Subjectivity in Percy Bysshe Shelley‟s Poetry Sabrina Palan Table of Contents 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 5 2. Romanticism – A Shift in Sensibilities .................................................................................. 8 2.1 Etymology of the Term “Romantic” ............................................................................. 9 2.2 A Portrait of a Cultural Period .....................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Wordsworth, Shelley, and the Long Search for Home Samantha Heffner Trinity University, [email protected]
    Trinity University Digital Commons @ Trinity English Honors Theses English Department 5-2017 Homeward Bound: Wordsworth, Shelley, and the Long Search for Home Samantha Heffner Trinity University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/eng_honors Recommended Citation Heffner, Samantha, "Homeward Bound: Wordsworth, Shelley, and the Long Search for Home" (2017). English Honors Theses. 28. http://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/eng_honors/28 This Thesis open access is brought to you for free and open access by the English Department at Digital Commons @ Trinity. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Trinity. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Homeward Bound: Wordsworth, Shelley, and the Long Search for Home Samantha Heffner A DEPARTMENT HONORS THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AT TRINITY UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR GRADUATION WITH DEPARTMENTAL HONORS DATE: April 15, 2017 Betsy Tontiplaphol Claudia Stokes THESIS ADVISOR DEPARTMENT CHAIR _____________________________________ Sheryl R. Tynes, AVPAA Heffner 2 Student Agreement I grant Trinity University (“Institution”), my academic department (“Department”), and the Texas Digital Library ("TDL") the non-exclusive rights to copy, display, perform, distribute and publish the content I submit to this repository (hereafter called "Work") and to make the Work available in any format in perpetuity as part of a TDL, Institution or Department repository communication or distribution effort. I understand that once the Work is submitted, a bibliographic citation to the Work can remain visible in perpetuity, even if the Work is updated or removed. I understand that the Work's copyright owner(s) will continue to own copyright outside these non-exclusive granted rights.
    [Show full text]
  • Minds Moving Upon Silence: PB Shelley, Robert
    Durham E-Theses MINDS MOVING ON SILENCE: P.B. Shelley, Robert Browning, W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot. GOSDEN-HOOD, SERENA,LUCY,MONTAGUE How to cite: GOSDEN-HOOD, SERENA,LUCY,MONTAGUE (2015) MINDS MOVING ON SILENCE: P.B. Shelley, Robert Browning, W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot., Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/11214/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 Minds Moving Upon Silence: P.B. Shelley, Robert Browning, W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot. Serena Gosden-Hood Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of PhD Durham University Department of English Studies December, 2014 1 Abstract Minds Moving Upon Silence: P.B Shelley, Robert Browning, W.B Yeats and T.S Eliot. The purpose of this study is to explore the function and significance of the various representations and manifestations of silence in the poetry of Shelley, Browning, Yeats and Eliot.
    [Show full text]
  • Manfred Lord Byron (1788–1824)
    Manfred Lord Byron (1788–1824) Dramatis Personæ MANFRED CHAMOIS HUNTER ABBOT OF ST. MAURICE MANUEL HERMAN WITCH OF THE ALPS ARIMANES NEMESIS THE DESTINIES SPIRITS, ETC. The scene of the Drama is amongst the Higher Alps—partly in the Castle of Manfred, and partly in the Mountains. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ Act I Scene I MANFRED alone.—Scene, a Gothic Gallery. Time, Midnight. Manfred THE LAMP must be replenish’d, but even then It will not burn so long as I must watch. My slumbers—if I slumber—are not sleep, But a continuance of enduring thought, 5 Which then I can resist not: in my heart There is a vigil, and these eyes but close To look within; and yet I live, and bear The aspect and the form of breathing men. But grief should be the instructor of the wise; 10 Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth, The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life. Philosophy and science, and the springs Of wonder, and the wisdom of the world, 15 I have essay’d, and in my mind there is A power to make these subject to itself— But they avail not: I have done men good, And I have met with good even among men— But this avail’d not: I have had my foes, 20 And none have baffled, many fallen before me— But this avail’d not:—Good, or evil, life, Powers, passions, all I see in other beings, Have been to me as rain unto the sands, Since that all—nameless hour.
    [Show full text]
  • Shelley's Poetic Inspiration and Its Two Sources: the Ideals of Justice and Beauty
    SHELLEY'S POETIC INSPIRATION AND ITS TWO SOURCES: THE IDEALS OF JUSTICE AND BEAUTY. by Marie Guertin •IBtlOrHEQf*' * "^ «« 11 Ottawa ^RYMtt^ Thesis presented to the School of Graduate Studies of the University of Ottawa as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English Literature Department of English Ottawa, Canada, 1977 , Ottawa, Canada, 1978 UMI Number: EC55769 INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMI UMI Microform EC55769 Copyright 2011 by ProQuest LLC All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 SHELLEY'S POETIC INSPIRATION AND ITS TWO SOURCES: THE IDEALS OF JUSTICE AND BEAUTY by Marie Guertin ABSTRACT The purpose of this dissertation is to show that most of Shelley's poetry can be better understood when it is related: (1) to each of the two ideals which constantly inspired Shelley in his life, thought and poetry; (2) to the increasing unity which bound these two ideals so closely together that they finally appeared, through most of his mature philosophical and poetical Works, as two aspects of the same Ideal.
    [Show full text]
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822)
    Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822) Biography: ercy Bysshe Shelley, (born Aug. 4, 1792, Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, Eng.— died July 8, 1822, at sea off Livorno, Tuscany [Italy]), English Romantic poet whose P passionate search for personal love and social justice was gradually channeled from overt actions into poems that rank with the greatest in the English language. Shelley was the heir to rich estates acquired by his grandfather, Bysshe (pronounced “Bish”) Shelley. Timothy Shelley, the poet’s father, was a weak, conventional man who was caught between an overbearing father and a rebellious son. The young Shelley was educated at Syon House Academy (1802–04) and then at Eton (1804–10), where he resisted physical and mental bullying by indulging in imaginative escapism and literary pranks. Between the spring of 1810 and that of 1811, he published two Gothic novels and two volumes of juvenile verse. In the fall of 1810 Shelley entered University College, Oxford, where he enlisted his fellow student Thomas Jefferson Hogg as a disciple. But in March 1811, University College expelled both Shelley and Hogg for refusing to admit Shelley’s authorship of The Necessity of Atheism. Hogg submitted to his family, but Shelley refused to apologize to his. 210101 Bibliotheca Alexandrina-Library Sector Compiled by Mahmoud Keshk Late in August 1811, Shelley eloped with Harriet Westbrook, the younger daughter of a London tavern owner; by marrying her, he betrayed the acquisitive plans of his grandfather and father, who tried to starve him into submission but only drove the strong-willed youth to rebel against the established order.
    [Show full text]
  • Shelley's Mont Blanc: the Secret Strength's Image Written on Water
    Title Shelley's "Mont Blanc" : The Secret Strength's Image Written on Water Author(s) Ikeda, Keiko Citation Osaka Literary Review. 47 P.19-P.32 Issue Date 2008-12-24 Text Version publisher URL https://doi.org/10.18910/25326 DOI 10.18910/25326 rights Note Osaka University Knowledge Archive : OUKA https://ir.library.osaka-u.ac.jp/ Osaka University Shelley's "Mont Blanc": The Secret Strength's Image Written on Water Keiko Ikeda Introduction One might wonder why the Egyptian motif is recurrent in Shelley's poems; "Ozymandias" (1818) deals with the large statue of an ancient king erected in the Egyptian desert. In Alastor (1816), the young Poet, the hero in the narrative poem, leaves his home in search of "strange truths" (77), where he visits the Egyptian ruins. In the destination of his journey, the "pyamid / Of mouldering leaves" (53-54) is built on the dead Poet. In Adonais (1820), the protagonist's tomb is metaphorically associ- ated with "one keen pyramid with wedge sublime" (444). To solve the question why Shelley puts these Egyptian motives into his poems, we can find the answer in the historical back- ground; the interest in the ancient Egypt was heightened in Europe during the period from 1800 to 1850 (Iversen 124-125). That cultural current was affected by Napoleon's invasion into Egypt in 1798 and Champollion's decipherment of the Rosetta stone in 1824 (Iversen 127-128; Lupton 21; Rice and MacDonald 7). If Shelley also absorbed this current into his writing of poetry, then his "Mont Blanc" (1816) is not irreverent to the wave of the cultural current.
    [Show full text]
  • Shelley in the Transition to Russian Symbolism
    SHELLEY IN THE TRANSITION TO RUSSIAN SYMBOLISM: THREE VERSIONS OF ‘OZYMANDIAS’ David N. Wells I Shelley is a particularly significant figure in the early development of Russian Symbolism because of the high degree of critical attention he received in the 1880s and 1890s when Symbolism was rising as a literary force in Russia, and because of the number and quality of his translators. This article examines three different translations of Shelley’s sonnet ‘Ozymandias’ from the period. Taken together, they show that the English poet could be interpreted in different ways in order to support radically different aesthetic ideas, and to reflect both the views of the literary establishment and those of the emerging Symbolist movement. At the same time the example of Shelley confirms a persistent general truth about literary history: that the literary past is constantly recreated in terms of the present, and that a shared culture can be used to promote a changing view of the world as well as to reinforce the status quo. The advent of Symbolism as a literary movement in Russian literature is sometimes seen as a revolution in which a tide of individualism, prompted by a crisis of faith at home, and combined with a new sense of form drawing on French models, replaced almost overnight the positivist and utilitarian traditions of the 1870s and 1880s with their emphasis on social responsibility and their more conservative approach to metre, rhyme and poetic style.1 And indeed three landmark literary events marking the advent of Symbolism in Russia occurred in the pivotal year of 1892 – the publication of Zinaida Vengerova’s groundbreaking article on the French Symbolist poets in Severnyi vestnik, the appearance of 1 Ronald E.
    [Show full text]
  • Mont Blanc in British Literary Culture 1786 – 1826
    Mont Blanc in British Literary Culture 1786 – 1826 Carl Alexander McKeating Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Leeds School of English May 2020 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. The right of Carl Alexander McKeating to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by Carl Alexander McKeating in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Acknowledgements I am grateful to Frank Parkinson, without whose scholarship in support of Yorkshire-born students I could not have undertaken this study. The Frank Parkinson Scholarship stipulates that parents of the scholar must also be Yorkshire-born. I cannot help thinking that what Parkinson had in mind was the type of social mobility embodied by the journey from my Bradford-born mother, Marie McKeating, who ‘passed the Eleven-Plus’ but was denied entry into a grammar school because she was ‘from a children’s home and likely a trouble- maker’, to her second child in whom she instilled a love of books, debate and analysis. The existence of this thesis is testament to both my mother’s and Frank Parkinson’s generosity and vision. Thank you to David Higgins and Jeremy Davies for their guidance and support. I give considerable thanks to Fiona Beckett and John Whale for their encouragement and expert interventions.
    [Show full text]
  • "I Am Not Thine: I Am Ap Art of Thee": Negotiating Subjective Entrapment
    "I AM NOT THINE: I AM APART OF THEE": NEGOTIATING SUBJECTIVE ENTRAPMENT AND THE ROMANTIC PERSISTENCE ON VISION IN PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY,S LYRICS By KASEY MARIE BOGERT Bachelor of Arts Oklahoma State University Stillwater, Oklahoma 2000 Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate College of Oklahoma State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS May,2004 "I AM NOT THINE: I AM A PART OF THEE": NEGOTIATING SUBJECTIVE ENTRAPMENT AND THE ROMANTIC PERSISTENCE ON VISION IN PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY' S LYRICS Thesis Approved: 11 PREFACE CRITICAL BACKGROUND Percy Bysshe Shelley was attacked often by readers and critics alike for his unapologetic denunciation of contemporary societal values, especially those pertaining to the British mores surrounding marriage and orthodox religion. So too, his attempts to revolutionize and liberate such a highly conventional poetic form as the Romantic lyric resulted in a virtual barrage of harsh criticism for striving towards the obtuse and convoluted. Furthermore, many denounced what they considered Shelley's overt libertine philosophy, one that so outraged the masses that it resulted in his admonishment from British society in 1816. Just as Shelley felt his ideals toward individuality and love were inseparable in his art, his critics found in that complex art justification for their suspicions on his delinquent nature and inferiority as a writer. John Mullan explains in The Lives of the Great Romantics this constant convergence of Shelley's public artistry with his private affairs and the reader's natural affinity for keeping both in mind: In Shelley's case the poetry seemed to force biography on the curious reader, and often to tempt the hostile critic to reflection on the poet's life.
    [Show full text]
  • The Gothic Element in Shelley's Writings
    31o/96 THE GOTHIC ELEMENT IN SHELLEY'S WRITINGS THESIS Presented to the Graduate Council of the North Texas State Teachers College in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS By Olna Oatis Boaz, B. A. Denton, Texas January, 1948 151916 151916 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. SHELLEY'S INTRODUCTION TO GOTHICISM . 1 II. IMITATION OF GOTHICISM . 18 III. TRANSMUTATION OF GOTHICISM . 82 BIBLIOGRAPHY . 0 0.. 0 .0 0 .. 0 .0 .. .0 .. .124 1ii CHAPTER I SHETLLEY'S INTRODUCTION TO GOTHICISM A sense of wonder, a love of the strange, a desire to feel the icy touch of fear are deeply rooted instincts of man. All tellers of tales know the lure of the marvelous. The shadow of terror and the sense of wonder lurk in folk tales and ballads, in myths, and in legends. The myth makers of civilization's infancy, the story tellers of olden times, the court minstrels, singing of heroic exploits, the old housewives in chimney corners, telling their tales of fairies, ghosts, and goblins, have all made use of the strange, the terrible, and the wonderful. Shelley, as befitted any boy gifted with a lively curiosity and a vivid imagination, was interested in the wonderful, the mysterious, and the strange. He loved to relate wonder tales to his little sisters; and he invented a fabulous tortoise inhabiting Warnham Pond, an equally fabulous snake of great age, and an old alchemist, who lived in the attic of Field Place. These flights of his versatile imagination excited the children and filled their minds with a pleasurable dread.
    [Show full text]
  • Mont Blanc”: Finding Faith in Shelleyan Skepticism
    “Mont Blanc”: Finding Faith in Shelleyan Skepticism Pallavi Juneja Senior Essay, Department of English Professor Finley April 9, 2015 Percy Bysshe Shelley is remembered as the most “radical” of the Romantic poets.1 He overwhelmingly resisted the dominant structures of 19th-century England, not only as a self-proclaimed “atheist,” but also as a vegetarian and animal rights activist. While Shelley’s resistance was progressive, it was never aggressive; after all, Shelley was neither a symbol of virility like Byron nor a symbol of durability like Wordsworth. Despite his death at 29, Shelley did not even symbolize tragically unmet potential, as Keats did. Instead, Shelley’s short life magnified the subtle complexities of the Romantic endeavor to find faith within the natural world. His career was uniquely defined by skepticism. The word “skepticism” is colloquially synonymous with doubt; however, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, skepticism is also considered philosophically as “the opinion that real knowledge of any kind is unattainable.” In this way, Shelley was famously a skeptic of institutionalized religion2, expressing epistemological doubt about God’s existence as early as 1811 in his pamphlet, “The Necessity of Atheism.” The pamphlet was certainly an uncommon publication in the 19th century; however, in the same time period, Romantic poetry commonly operated outside the confines of religion—at least according to an accepted definition of Romanticism: “a belief in the power of, and necessity for, humans to construct their own meanings out of the known facts of nature rather than the unknowable postulates of religion” (Priestman 6). While Shelley, as a Romantic poet, ultimately searched for meaning in the external world, his later poetic 1 Princeton University Press even published a book, titled Radical Shelley.
    [Show full text]