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THE EDUCATION OF A POET: A STUDY OF SHELLEY'S "THE REVOLT OF ISLAM." Item Type text; Dissertation-Reproduction (electronic) Authors Ackerman, Jan Condra Bryant, 1941- Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 09/10/2021 02:56:46 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/290406 INFORMATION TO USERS This material was produced from a microfilm copy of the original document. While the most advanced technological means to photograph and reproduce this document have been used, the quality is heavily dependent upon the quality of the original submitted. 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Xerox University Microfilms 300 North Zsab Road Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 76-28,207 ACKERMAN, Jan Condra Bryant, 1941- THE EDUCATION OF A POET: A STUDY OF SHELLEY'S THE REVOLT OF ISLAM, The University of Arizona, Ph.D., 1976 Literature, modern Xerox University Microfilms , Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 THE EDUCATION OF A POET: A STUDY OF SHELLEY'S THE REVOLT OF ISLAM by Jan Condra Bryant Ackerman A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 19 7 6 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA. GRADUATE COLLEGE I hereby recommend that this dissertation prepared under my direction by Jan Condra Bryant Ackerman entitled The Education of a Poet: A Study of Shelley's Thp Revolt of Islam be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement of the degree of rmrfrn-r nf pm inonphy Of . , , , . , {.(( V/• \Uc i-Utc/ ^Mfca *k/ {*7 Dissertation Director Date (/ ^ After inspection of the final copy of the dissertation, the follov/ing members of the Final Examination Committee concur in its approval and recommend its acceptance: )U' \ii4&6 htAt// / 9 •&.1JL a i 1-1 _ yfay ? I, /•? ? c This approval and acceptance is contingent on the candidate's adequate performance and defense of this dissertation at the final oral examination. The inclusion of this sheet bound into the library copy of the dissertation is evidence of satisfactory performance at the final examination. STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to bor­ rowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted, by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author. SIGNED: PKn-jhllfKV\tlA"| , PREFACE This is not a source study in the usual sense of the term: I have not simply tracked down sources for particular passages in Shelley's first major epic, The Revolt of Islam, but I have attempted to relate Shelley's life and reading to the theme and structure of his work. In this way my critical perspective approximates Shelley's own view of his epic as stated in his Preface and Dedication. Here he sug­ gests that Revolt is autobiographical and uniquely his own but, of necessity, also part of the spirit of his age. Our efforts to illumi­ nate the personal dimension of the poem are complicated by the vast amount of reading Shelley did before writing his epic. Mary Shelley's list of their reading from 1814 to 1817 is formidable in itself, and scholars have continued to infer other works from the allusions and echoes of Revolt. Shelley's work, then, is both intensely personal and also reflective of the literary environment of his age. It is not sur­ prising that a good deal of his earlier reading was devoted to personal memoirs, travel journals, and other autobiographical writing. In such books Shelley found direct accounts of individuals seeking meaning in the universe in a firsthand way. Shelley begins his own narrative in Revolt on these same experiential grounds but attempts to move from his autobiographical narrative into allegory. The purpose of this study is to trace the relationship between narrative and allegory in Shelley's Revolt. iii iv I would like to thank the Wilson Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, particularly the staff of the Rare Book Room, for supplying me with many of the books that have been valuable for this study. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT vil 1. INTRODUCTION 1 Shelley and The Spirit of the Age 4 Shelley and the Problem of Writing a Nineteenth-Century Epic ..... 19 2. THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL PROBLEM 25 Shelley's Argument Against Locke . 25 Shelley and Sir William Drummond ............ 32 Shelley and William Godwin ...... ... 38 3. SHELLEY'S REVOLT AND THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL 44 Shelley and Rousseau ....... • 46 Shelley's Revolt and the Pastoral Tradition of the Autobiographical-Educational Novel . 52 Shelley's Revolt as an Epic Extension of the Autobiography .... ........ 61 Mary Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Women, or Maria 61 William Godwin's Mandeville . 66 Shelley's Revolt and the Interplay between Autobiography and Allegory .............. 71 4. SHELLEY'S REVOLT AND TRAVEL LITERATURE 87 Man's Origin ...................... 92 Cannibalism, Man's Fall from Natural Goodness ..... 95 Domestic and Political Tyranny 108 Mental Geography .................... 115 5. SHELLEY'S REVOLT, AN ALLEGORY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 128 Shelley's Revolt and Revolutionary Memoirs: The Prob.lem of Creating a Dialectic ........... 130 Shelley's Revolt and Revolutionary Memoirs: The Negative Pole of Allegory 138 v vi TABLE OF CONTENTS--Continued Page The Positive Pole of Shelley's Revolt: The Idealization of the 1789 Republic 143 The Positive Pole of Shelley's Revolt: The Idealization of Romantic Love ............. 159 6. SHELLEY'S REVOLT: A STUDY OF ALLEGORY 165 Discovery of the Origin of Language 166 Language in Time: The Separation of Ideals from History 176 The Language of Accommodation 179 The Language of Simplification 184 The Language of Silence ............... 187 Afterword 191 REFERENCES 194 ABSTRACT In The Revolt of Islam Shelley reworked the traditional epic form in order to accommodate the epistemological problem of his age. Empiricists such as Locke and Hume had questioned the validity of the mind's movement from primal sensations to generalizations and from generalizations to ideals. Shelley, like Sir William Drunnnond and William Godwin, believed that the mind was informed not only by experi­ ence but, more important, also by permanent truths outside of experience. In Laon and Cythna, the hero and heroine of Revolt, Shelley portrays two minds in the act of uniting experience and ideal­ isms. Shelley's Revolt contains both the traditional statement of allegorical truths and a narrative describing the ways in which his two protagonists discover these truths: in Canto I a divine tutor narrates history's progresses from Hellenism, through Christianity, to the French Revolution, and finally to a future revolution which would improve upon that failed experiment. Cantos II-XI concern the story of how Laon and Cythna discover the possibility of historical perfect­ ibility in their actions in a type of French Revolution and, more important, in their reflection upon their actions. Shelley's task in Revolt, otherwise, is to bring together these two approaches to alle­ gory, the permanent truths of Canto I and the process of discovering the grounds of these truths in the epic narrative. vii viii The central portion of this study relates the structure and ideas of Shelley's narrative to experiential genres like the autobio­ graphical novel, travel literature, and revolutionary memoirs. These genres were important to Shelley because they were written in response to the same epistemological problem he faced, that is, how to move from personal experience to eternal truths.

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