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The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley takes stock of current developments in the study of a major Romantic poet and prose-writer, and seeks to advance Shelley studies in new directions. It consists of forty-two chapters written by an international cast of established and emerging scholar-critics. This Handbook is divided into five thematic sections: Biography and Relationships; Prose; Poetry; Cultures, Traditions, Influences; and Afterlives. The first section reappraises Shelley's life and relationships, including those with his publishers through whom he sought to reach an audience for the 'Ashes and sparks' of his thought, and with women, creative collaborators as well as muse-figures. The second section gives his under-investigated prose works detailed attention, bringing multiple perspectives to bear on his conceptual positions, and demonstrating the range of his achievement in prose works from novels to political and poetic treatises. The third section explores Shelley's creativity and gift as a poet, emphasizing his capacity to excel in many different poetic genres. The fourth section looks at Shelley's response to past and present literary cultures, both English and international, and at his immersion in science, music, theatre, the visual arts, and travel. The fifth section concludes the volume by analysing Shelley's literary and cultural afterlife, from his influence on Victorians and Moderns, to his status as the exemplary poet for Deconstruction. Packed with stimulating insights and readings, The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley brings out the relevance to Shelley's own work of his dictum that 'All high poetry is infinite' .
List of contents
- Introduction
- BIOGRAPHY AND RELATIONSHIPS
- Shelley and the British Isles
- Shelley and Italy
- Resolutions, Destinations: Shelley s Last Year
- Shelley and Women
- Shelley and his Publishers
- PART 2 PROSE
- Shelley and Philosophy: On a Future State, Speculations on Metaphysics and Morals, On Life
- Religion and Ethics: The Necessity of Atheism, A Refutation of Deism, On Christianity
- Love, Sexuality, Gender: On Love, Discourse on Love, and The Banquet of Plato
- Politics and Satire
- Politics, Protest, and Social Reform: Irish Pamphlets, Notes to Queen Mab, Letter to Lord Ellenborough, A Philosophical View of Reform
- Poetics
- Prose Fiction: Zastrozzi, St. Irvyne, The Assassins, The Coliseum
- Shelley's Letters
- PART 3 POETRY
- Shelley's Draft Notebooks
- Lyric Development: Esdaile Notebook to Hymns of 1816
- Epic Experiments: Queen Mab and Laon and Cythna
- Quest Poetry: Alastor and Epipsychidion
- Lyrical Drama: Prometheus Unbound and Hellas
- Tragedy: The Cenci and Swellfoot the Tyrant
- Shelley's Familiar Style : Rosalind and Helen, Julian and Maddalo, and Letter to Maria Gisborne
- Sonnets and Odes
- Popular Songs and Ballads: Writing the Unwritten Story in 1819
- Visionary Rhyme: The Sensitive-Plant and The Witch of Atlas
- Lyrics and Love Poems: Poems to Sophia Stacey, Jane Williams, and Mary Shelley
- Shelley's Pronouns: Lyrics, Hellas, Adonais, and The Triumph of Life
- PART 4 CULTURES, TRADITIONS, INFLUENCES
- Shelley and the Bible
- Shelley, Mythology, and the Classical Tradition
- Shelley and the Italian Tradition
- Origins of Evil: Shelley, Goethe, Calderón, and Rousseau
- Shelley and Milton
- Shelley and the English Tradition: Spenser and Pope
- Shelley and His Contemporaries
- Shelley and Music
- Shelley, Shakespeare, and Theatre
- Shelley, the Visual Arts, and Cinema
- Shelley's Sciences
- Shelley, Travel, and Tourism
- PART FIVE AFTERLIVES
- Shelley and the Nineteenth Century
- The Influences of Shelley on Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Poetry
- Editing Shelley
- Shelley Criticism from Romanticism to Modernism
- Shelley Criticism from Deconstruction to the Present
About the author
Michael O'Neill is a well-known critic of poetry, and has written monographs on Shelley (1989), Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem (1997), and The All-Sustaining Air (2007). He edited The Cambridge History of English Poetry (2010), and has also co-edited (with Madeleine Callaghan) Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry: Hardy to Mahon (2011), and a much-praised anthology of Romantic poetry with detailed comments on poetic form (2007), both for Blackwell. He has published two collections of poems, and received a Cholmondeley Award for Poets in 1990. His work has been much praised by many critics for its sensitivity to poetry and its ability to find an answerable language for poetic effects.
Anthony Howe has taught at both Cambridge and Oxford Universities and is currently Reader and Director of Graduate Research at Birmingham City University. He has published essays on Byron and Shelley and is currently finishing a monograph entitled Byron and the Forms of Thought for Liverpool University Press.
Madeleine Callaghan is Lecturer in Romantic Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her research specialty is the poetry of Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Yeats, and she also has research interests in post-war British and Irish poetry. She is the co-editor (with Michael O´Neill) of Twentieth Century British and Irish Poetry: Hardy to Mahon.
Summary
The book is an authoritative and up-to-date collection of original essays on one of the greatest of all English poets, Percy Bysshe Shelley. It covers a wide range of topics, exploring Shelley's life and work from various angles.
Additional text
The volume has a long-range critical lens, and it is fair to say that this should give it a place for many years to come. Equally, the elegant and deeply informed formalism practised in many of the essays here is no bad model for future Shelley Studies ... one cannot fail to be impressed overall by a book that offers such a thorough and learned overview of all aspects of Shelley, whilst also striking any reader on any given page with sharp and surprising readings of individual moments, contexts or stanzas. One could not ask for much more in a book of this nature.
Report
The result is nothing less than a fascinating, encyclopaedic account of the many genres, modes, and concerns of Shelley's writing, the many contemporary and academic approaches to that writing, and Shelley's many and varied influences on subsequent cultural texts. Cian Duffy, European Romantic Review
