This study of the poetry and drama of Percy Bysshe Shelley reads the letters and their biographical contexts to shed light on the poetry, tracing the ambiguous and shifting relationship between the poet's art and life. For Shelley, both life and art are transfigured by their relationship with one another where the 'poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one' but is equally bound up with and formed by the society in which he lives and the past that he inherits. Callaghan shows that the distinctiveness of Shelley's work comes to rest on its wrong-footing of any neat division of life and art. The dazzling intensity of Shelley's poetry and drama lies in its refusal to separate the twain as Shelley explores and finally explodes the boundaries between what is personal and what is poetic. Arguing that the critic, like the artist, cannot ignore the conditions of the poet's life, Callaghan reveals how Shelley's artistry reconfigures and redraws the actual in his poetry. The book shows how Shelley's poetic daring lies in troubling the distinction between poetry as aesthetic work hermetically sealed against life, and poetry as a record of the emotional life of the poet.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) was one of the major poets of the English Romantic period. This is the final volume of a six-volume edition of The Poems of Shelley, which aims to present all of Shelley’s poems in chronological order and with full annotation. Date and circumstances of composition are provided for each poem and all manuscript and printed sources relevant to establishing an authoritative text are freshly examined and assessed. Headnotes and footnotes furnish the personal, literary, historical and scientific information necessary to an informed reading of Shelley’s varied and allusive verse. Most of the poems in the present volume were composed between late January 1822 and Shelley’s death on 8 July 1822. These include the lyrics to Jane Williams, Fragments of an Unfinished Drama and The Triumph of Life as well as translations from Goethe’s Faust (1822) and Calderón’s El mágico prodigioso. The appendices include editions of Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things (1811), a poem made publicly accessible by the Bodleian Libraries in 2015 for the first time since its publication, and translations by Shelley from Goethe’s Faust (1815), Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound (1817) and Homer’s Odyssey (probably 1817). In addition to accompanying commentaries, there are extensive bibliographies to the poems, a chronological table of Shelley’s life and publications, and indexes to titles and first lines. Now completed, this is the most comprehensive edition of Shelley’s poetry available to students and scholars.

This study addresses the question of artistic identity and the myth of the artist as it has been shaped by the artists themselves. While the term artist is to be understood in a broad sense, the focus of this study is the literature of the Romantic tradition. Identity is largely perceived as a construct, and a central hypothesis of this book concerns its aesthetic value and the ways it creates dominant narratives of self-perception that produce powerful myths. The construction of the artist’s identity, be it collective or personal, rests on a series of aesthetic praxes. Caught between the mythic idealisation of poetic genius and its social devaluation, the Romantic artist seeks to create a place for himself, and in doing so, he engages in his own mythmaking. This process is studied in an interdisciplinary perspective, approaching texts and writers from different traditions. The study analyses various typologies of the artist, numerous mythmaking strategies as well as several postural techniques; all of which have sketched major direct or indirect fictional self-portraits in the European tradition.

Taking in works from writers as diverse as William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Brontë, John Keats, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, this book spans approximately 300 years and unpacks how bodily liquidity, porosity and petrification recur as a pattern and underlie the chequered history of the body and genders in literature. Lennartz examines the precarious relationship between porosity and its opposite – closure, containment and stoniness – and explores literary history as a meandering narrative in which 'female' porosity and 'manly' stoniness clash, showing how different societies and epochs respond to and engage with bodily porosity. This book considers the ways that this relationship is constantly renegotiated and where effusive and 'feminine' genres, such as 'sloppy' letters and streams of consciousness, are pitted against stony and astringent forms of masculinity, like epitaphs, sonnets and the Bildungsroman.

The Artistry of Exile is a new reading of one of the most important themes of nineteenth-century literature. Exile represents a crisis in the always present tension between self and culture, the disturbance of memory, the quest for home, and the survival or not of life's heart quakes — all of which became identifying features of canonical Romanticism. Focusing on two interlinked groups of writers who, for various reasons, felt cast out of England and sought refuge in Italy, this book traces the material and metaphoric dynamics of distance in poems, novels and epistolary conversations. The book brings into dialogue the self-alienation and existential antagonism of the Cain figure with the contingencies of real travel: conversations about writing desks, lost parcels of books, missing pans and stray camels. Domestic and cosmic perspectives mingle as the book reveals how writers realize the full resonance of Dante's vivid summation of exile in the taste of different bread and the difficulty of another man's stairs. As a country that only exists in the early nineteenth-century as a memory, Italy both embodies and energises formal attempts to bridge the distance created by exile in the work of the Byron-Shelley circle and the later Barrett-Browning- Browning collaboration. Examining these writers in relation to Italian art, sound, religion, narrative art and history, the book presents a new perspective on Romantic canonicity and relocates contemporary ideas of cosmopolitanism in the aesthetic, ethical and political debates of the late Romantic and early Victorian world.

Eternity in British Romantic Poetry explores the representation of the relationship between eternity and the mortal world in the poetry of the period. It offers an original approach to Romanticism that demonstrates, against the grain, the dominant intellectual preoccupation of the era: the relationship between the mortal and the eternal. The project's scope is two-fold: firstly, it analyses the prevalence and range of images of eternity (from apocalypse and afterlife to transcendence) in Romantic poetry; secondly, it opens up a new and more nuanced focus on how Romantic poets imagined and interacted with the idea of eternity. Every poet featured in the book seeks and finds their uniqueness in their apprehension of eternity. From Blake’s assertion of the Eternal Now to Keats’s defiance of eternity, Wordsworth’s ‘two consciousnesses’ versus Coleridge’s capacious poetry, Byron’s swithering between versions of eternity compared to Shelleyan yearning, and Hemans’s superlative account of everlasting female suffering, each poet finds new versions of eternity to explore or reject. This monograph sets out a paradigm-shifting approach to the aesthetic and philosophical power of eternity in Romantic poetry.

Byron’s and Shelley’s experimentation with the possibilities and pitfalls of poetic heroism unites their work. The Poet-Hero in the Work of Byron and Shelley traces the evolution of the poet-hero in the work of both poets, revealing that the struggle to find words adequate to the poet’s imaginative vision and historical circumstance is their central poetic achievement. Madeleine Callaghan explores the different types of poetic heroism that evolve in Byron’s and Shelley’s poetry and drama. Both poets experiment with, challenge and embrace a variety of poetic forms and genres, and this book discusses such generic exploration in the light of their developing versions of the poet-hero. The heroism of the poet, as an idea, an ideal and an illusion, undergoes many different incarnations and definitions as both poets shape distinctive and changing conceptions of the hero throughout their careers.

Compiles career biographies of over 1,200 artists and rock music reviews written by fans covering every phase of rock from R & B through punk and rap.

Social reform and the new transatlanticism -- The novel of purpose and Anglo-American realism -- Charles Dickens : a reformer abroad and at home -- Anne Brontë and Elizabeth Stoddard : temperance pledges, marriage vows -- George Eliot and Henry James : exemplary women and typical Americans -- Mark Twain : reformers and other con artists -- Thomas Hardy : new women, old purposes.