Exploring the rhetorical and phenomenological links between shame and reticence, this book examines the psychology of Shelley’s anguished poet-Subject. Shelley’s 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 Shelley’s 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. Shelley’s 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 Shelley’s major works. These interpretations show that awakening the reader’s ethical discretion creates a constructive dynamic which challenges influential deconstructive readings of the unfinished nature of Shelley’s work and thought.
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.
Introductioni Shelley’s Shamesii Shame Theoriesiii Reticenceiv Affect and Romanticismv TextsChapter One: Reticent Impersonations: Shelley’s Unhappy Consciousness i The Empty Subjectii Bad Faithiii Shame and Ideologyiv Historicismv The Problems of MaterialismChapter Two: Alastor’s Mute Poetsi Shelley and Wordsworthii Rejecting ‘natural piety’iii The veilèd maid and the disgrace of the alternativeiv The narrator as victim of his own constructionsChapter Three: Shame, Silence and Historicism in The Cencii Beatrice’s Casuistryii Shame and De-humanisationiii Shame as Self-constructionChapter Four: Julian and Maddalo: What the ‘cold world shall not know’i The Reticence of ‘the cold world’ and Shelley’s Critique of Symbolsii The Maniac’s Resistance and Byron’s ‘Prometheus’ iii The Maniac’s Performance of Shameiv Julian’s ReserveChapter Five: Metaphysical Sympathiesi Sympathetic Poetics in A Defence of Poetryii Transcending the Ego in Ode to the West Wind, Mont Blanc, Ode to Intellectual Beauty and AdonaisChapter Six: The Jane Poems: Love, Lyric and Lifei Eroticism and the hollowness of the "Lyric I"ii Sensory Bad faithiii Beyond DenialChapter Seven: The Triumph of Life: Pleasure versus process and the shame of self-knowledgei The Failure of Allegoryii Rousseau as the Subject-in-Shameiii Countering the ‘cold glare’Conclusion