Embodying Revolution: The Figure of the Poet in Shelley (Oxford English Monographs) - Hardcover

Clark, Timothy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198129815 ISBN 13: 9780198129813

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1989

Synopsis

A strange figure recurs throughout Shelley's work, a solitary young poet hounded by passion or madness to the grave. This study reveals the figure to be an allegory of a violent revolutionary age. Seen in the context of a largely forgotten ideal that connected introspection with radical politics, Clark demonstrates that Shelley's self-analyses and metaphysical speculations are related to a notion of the poet as an explorer in previously unchartered regions of the human mind. He shows that ultimately, the curiously weak Shelleyan poet is really an ambivalent fictional embodiment of the social forces tearing Europe apart in the Romantic age.

About this title

About the Author

Timothy Clark, Lecturer in English, University of New England, New South Wales.

Review

'None of this is exactly unfamiliar material but it has not, I think, been so clearly elaborated before or so accurately referred to its sources.'
Times Higher Education Supplement

`interesting and often persuasive readings of Shelley's works and ideas'
Review of English Studies

'The strength of the book dervies from the rich contextual detail it offers in approaching Shelley's major verse and prose.'
William Keach, Brown University, Modern Philology, 89:3, February 1992

'The scholarship in terms of command of contemporary materials as well as recent critical work is impressive ... the use of the Bodleian manuscripts, as well as contemporary reviews, is especially noteworthy.'
Peter Morgan, University of Toronto, English Studies, Volume 73, Number 1, February 1992

'erudite and closely argued study ... a thoughtful effort whose arguments and conclusions will be of interest to any student of Shelley's difficult and perennially challenging philosophy of mind and his theory of the poet's socio-historical importance as an "unacknowledged legislator of
mankind".'
Michael J. Neth, Middle Tennessee State University, Keats-Shelley Journal

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0198129815
• ISBN 13: 9780198129813
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 310