Shelley's Process: Radical Transference and the Development of His Major Works

In this set of thorough and revisionary readings of Percy Bysshe Shelley's best-known writings in verse and prose, Hogle argues that the logic and style in all these works are governed by a movement in every thought, memory, image, or word-pattern whereby each is seen and sees itself in terms of a radically different form. For any specified entity or figure to be known for "what it is," it must be reconfigured by and in terms of another one at another level (which must then be dislocated itself). In so delineating Shelley's "process," Hogle reveals the revisionary procedure in the poet's various texts and demonstrates the powerful effects of "radical transference" in Shelley's visions of human possibility.

"Hogle brings an impressive breadth and depth of learning to the development of an intriguing and original argument about the nature of Sshelley's work."--Modern Philology

"Hogle's style--its capacity for supple inflections, conceptual agility, and alertness to implication--frequently impresses, even delights....There is no questioning the energy and intelligence with which it demonstrates the operations of transference in Shelley's work. It is, quite simply, one of the most significant books ever written about the poet."--Wordsworth Circle

"The most ambitious study of Shelley since Wasserman's, one that seems destined to energize a new critical generation through its dynamic intellectual power. No previous critic of Shelley has been as able to balance the daunting range of his poetic refinement and political radicalism. The chapter on Prometheus Unbound and the mythographic poetry is the highest ground ever reached by Shelley criticism, a combination of exemplary critical assimilation, deep learnedness, and penetrating acumen. Though no critical book is ever exactly definitive, Hogle has dared such a comparison. Shelley's Process will be an essential reservoir for the study of the poet and his period for as long as one can conceive."--Stuart Curran, University of Pennsylvania

"The most intellectual challenging book on Shelley since Earl R. Wasserman's Shelley: A Critical (1971). Future critics of the poet, whether or not they agree with Hogle's thesis and the readings that evoke from it, will have to come to terms with his study, in which they will find important information gleaned from recent Shelley scholarship."--Modern Language Quarterly

"Hogle has a profound knowledge of the literature Shelly knew, and his readings are always intense, never inane. His published essays have been provocative and influential. This deep and wide study of Shelly will meet with a like response."--Studies in Romanticism