Shelley’s Poetics of Reticence

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 Shelley’s poetry and philosophy.

Introduction

i Shelley’s Shames

ii Shame Theories

iii Reticence

iv Affect and Romanticism

v Texts

Chapter One: Reticent Impersonations: Shelley’s Unhappy Consciousness

i The Empty Subject

ii Bad Faith

iii Shame and Ideology

iv Historicism

v The Problems of Materialism

Chapter Two: Alastor’s Mute Poets

i Shelley and Wordsworth

ii Rejecting ‘natural piety’

iii The veilèd 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 Beatrice’s 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 Shelley’s Critique of Symbols

ii The Maniac’s Resistance and Byron’s ‘Prometheus’

iii The Maniac’s Performance of Shame

iv Julian’s 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