A critical examination of Percy Shelley's drama, The Cenci, inspired by an Italian family. Looks at the history, dramatic structure, characterization, and style of Shelley's verses.
Today, Percy Bysshe Shelley is an emblem of the Romantic movement and one of the lights of English culture--his poems memorized by schoolchildren, his life honored with a memorial in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner. That wasn't always the case, however. In his own day, Shelley was widely loathed, seen as an immoral atheist and a traitor to his class for his revolutionary politics. His work was damned as well, receiving scathing reviews rooted as much in disapproval of his politics and personal life as in the verse itself. That's the Shelley that Jacqueline Mulhallen brings to life in this accessible, political biography: the Shelley who, though writing when the working class was in its infancy, clearly grasped--and wanted to change--the system of oppression under which laborers and women lived. The revolutionary Shelley, Mulhallen shows, has long served as an inspiration to figures from Karl Marx to W. B. Yeats to the poets and writers of today, and for popular movements like the Chartists and the suffragettes, even as his public image and poetry became part of the establishment. An engaging look at one of English history and literature's most compelling, complicated, and talented figures, Percy Bysshe Shelley will be a valuable contribution to our understanding of the man and his work.
Shelley's tragedy, The Cenci, has been regarded as an avant-garde attack on orthodox Christian principles, a celebrated cause for Victorian intellectuals, a vehicle for innovative minds of the theater, a historical oddity, a neglected masterpiece. Derived from the dark legends of one of Rome's great families, the Cenci records a history of sadism, incest, and murder. Shelley's one actable play has received little attention in modern times. Professor Curran studies it first as a poem-its patterns, themes, imagery-then as a play. After showing its relationship to England's Regency theater, he analyzes the fascinating course of its stage history, and finds Shelley foreshadowing such modern emphases as psychodrama, the existential vision, the Theatre of Cruelty. Originally published in 1970. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Although Frankenstein is now widely taught in classes on Romanticism, little attention has been paid to the considerable corpus of Mary Shelley's other works. Indeed the excitement of the last decade at feminist approaches to Frankenstein has ironically obscured the persona of its author. This collection of essays, written by a preeminent group of Romantic scholars, sketches a portrait of the "other Mary Shelley": the writer and intellectual who recognized the turbulent interplay among issues of family, gender, and society, and whose writings resonate strongly in the setting of contemporary politics, culture, and feminism. By analyzing a previously neglected body of novels, novellas, reviews, travel writing, essays, letters, biographies, and tales, and by emphasizing Mary Shelley's shrewd assessment of Romanticism, the essays in this volume offer a ground-breaking evaluation of one of the foremost cultural critics of the nineteenth century.
The Poetic Plays Of Wordsworth, Coleridge And Southey Convey Both Assurance And Anxiety - Balancing And Counterpointing Each Other And The Object Of The Present Study Is To Show How This Balancing And Counter-Pointing Enrich The Texture Of Their Plays. Truly, Their Creative Energy Was Considerably Cramped By The Condi¬Tions Prevailing In The Contemporary Theatre, And It Is Also True That They Show An Inadequate Grasp Of Dramatic Art And Dramatic Dialogue; But What Is Remarkable In Their Dramatic Works Is Their Capacity To Seize And Analyse The Spiritual Dilemma Of The Age; Their Persistent Moral Ardour Exposes The Ailments And Iniquities Afflicting The Social Order And Also Questions And Scrutinizes The Possible Modes Of Freedom. In Fact, This Is Mainly A Study Of The Moral Concerns In The Plays Of The Three Elder English Romantic Poets Their Anxiety About The Mystery And Potency Of Evil And How To Com¬Bat It, The Issues Of Ends And Means That Have Disturbed The Sensitive Rebels Throughout Ages.The Embivalent Poetical Characters, Their Gravitation Towards Drama, Struggle For Stage Success, The Contem¬Porary Theatrical Condition, The Un-Realized Projects, The Dramatic And Stylistic Qualities, Literary Issues, Etc. Have Also Been Discussed Incidentally.