Shelleyan Reimaginings and Influence

Abstract

Abstract Through close readings, Shelleyan Reimaginings and Influence: New Relations seeks to bring out the imaginative and formal brilliance of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s writing as it explores his involvement in processes of dialogue and influence. Shelley is among the major Romantic poetic exponents and theorists of influence because of his passionately intelligent commitment to the onward dissemination of ideas and feelings and to the unpredictable ways in which poets position themselves and are culturally positioned between past and future. The book has a tripartite structure. The first three chapters seek to illuminate his response to representative texts, figures, and themes that constitute the triple pillars of his cultural inheritance: the classical world (Plato); Renaissance poetry (Spenser and Milton); and Christianity—in particular, the concept of deity and the Bible. The second and major section of the book, from Chapters 4 to 12, explores Shelley’s relations and affinities with, as well as differences from, his immediate predecessors and contemporaries: Hazlitt and Lamb; Wordsworth; Coleridge; Southey; Byron; Keats (including the influence of Dante on Shelley’s elegy for his fellow Romantic); and the great painter J. M. W. Turner, with whom he is often linked. The third section considers Shelley’s reception by later nineteenth-century writers, figures influenced by and responding to Shelley: the figures chosen are Beddoes, Hemans, Landon, Tennyson, and Swinburne. A Coda discusses the body of critical work on Shelley produced by A. C. Bradley, a figure who stands at the threshold of twentieth-century thinking about Shelley.

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