Through new readings of Shelleys verse, this book engages with the affective, phenomenological and ethical dimensions of shame, as it is made manifest by Shelleys textual strategies of reticence.
Exploring the rhetorical and phenomenological links between shame and reticence, this book examines the psychology of Shelleys anguished poet-Subject. Shelleys struggles with the fragility of the self have largely been seen as the result of thinking which connects emotional hyperstimulation to moral and political undermining of the individual will. This work takes a different approach, suggesting that Shelleys insecurities stemmed from anxieties about the nature of aesthetic self-representation. Shame is an appropriate affective marker of such anxiety because it occurs at the cusp between internal and external self-evaluation. Shelleys reticent poetics transfers an affective sense of shame to the reader and provokes interpretive responsibility. Paying attention to the affective contours of texts, this book presents new readings of Shelleys major works. These interpretations show that awakening the readers ethical discretion creates a constructive dynamic which challenges influential deconstructive readings of the unfinished nature of Shelleys work and thought.
Introduction
i Shelleys Shames
ii Shame Theories
iii Reticence
iv Affect and Romanticism
v Texts
Chapter One: Reticent Impersonations: Shelleys Unhappy Consciousness
i The Empty Subject
ii Bad Faith
iii Shame and Ideology
iv Historicism
v The Problems of Materialism
Chapter Two: Alastors Mute Poets
i Shelley and Wordsworth
ii Rejecting natural piety
iii The veilčd maid and the disgrace of the alternative
iv The narrator as victim of his own constructions
Chapter Three: Shame, Silence and Historicism in The Cenci
i Beatrices Casuistry
ii Shame and De-humanisation
iii Shame as Self-construction
Chapter Four: Julian and Maddalo: What the cold world shall not know
i The Reticence of the cold world and Shelleys Critique of Symbols
ii The Maniacs Resistance and Byrons Prometheus
iii The Maniacs Performance of Shame
iv Julians Reserve
Chapter Five: Metaphysical Sympathies
i Sympathetic Poetics in A Defence of Poetry
ii Transcending the Ego in Ode to the West Wind, Mont Blanc, Ode to
Intellectual Beauty and Adonais
Chapter Six: The Jane Poems: Love, Lyric and Life
i Eroticism and the hollowness of the "Lyric I"
ii Sensory Bad faith
iii Beyond Denial
Chapter Seven: The Triumph of Life: Pleasure versus process and the shame of
self-knowledge
i The Failure of Allegory
ii Rousseau as the Subject-in-Shame
iii Countering the cold glare
Conclusion
Merrilees Roberts is a teaching associate at Queen Mary, University of London, where she teaches mainly literary theory. She also completed her doctoral work on Percy Shelley at Queen Mary, examining reticence in Percy Shelleys poetry and philosophy.
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