Title
Shelley and His Readers: Beyond Paranoid Politics (Volume 1),Used
Sold by Ergodebooks, an authorized reseller.
Returns accepted within 30 days | support@ergodebooks.com
Shipping Information
- Free Standard Shipping — United States only
- Processing Time: 1–3 business days
- Estimated Delivery: 3–5 business days after dispatch
- Double-boxed, fully insured & discreetly packaged
- Tracking number sent via email once dispatched
- Orders over $250 require signature upon delivery. Taxes calculated at checkout.
Returns & Refund
Returns accepted within 30 days of delivery.
Damaged or Defective Item
Free return shipping + replacement or full refund
Wrong Item Received
Free return shipping + replacement or full refund
Change of Mind
Return shipping at customer's expense · 25% restocking fee applies
Payment Option
In Shelley and His Readers, the first fulllength critical analysis of the dialogue between Shelley's poetry and its contemporary reviewers, Kim Wheatley argues that Shelley's idealism can be recovered through the study of his poetry's reception. Incorporating extensive research in major earlynineteenthcentury British periodicals, Wheatley integrates a receptionbased methodology with careful textual analysis to demonstrate that the early reception of Shelley's work registers the immediate impact of the poet's increasingly idealistic passion for reforming the world.Wheatley examines Shelley's poetry within the context of Romanticera "paranoid politics," a simultaneously empowering and disabling dynamic in which the reviewers employ a heightened language of defensiveness and persecution that paints their adversaries as Satanic rebels against orthodoxy. This "paranoid style" displays a preoccupation with the efficacy of the printed word and singles out radical writers such as Shelley as sources of social contamination.Using Shelley's Queen Mab to illustrate his early radicalism, Wheatley demonstrates that the poet, like his contemporary reviewers, is caught up in paranoid rhetoric. Failing to challenge the assumptions underlying the paranoid styleconspiracy and contagionin this poem Shelley takes merely a defiant, oppositional stance. However, Shelley's later poems, exemplified by Prometheus Unbound and Adonais, circumvent the reviewers' rhetoric through their boldly experimental language, a process registered by the reviewers' own responses. These less explicitly political poems transcend the dynamics of cultural paranoia by shifting to an apolitical conception of the aesthetic. In collaboration with its early readers, Shelley's poetry thus moves momentarily beyond paranoid politics.The final chapter of this study argues that the posthumous reception of Adonais uniquely replicates the elegiac moves and complex idealism of the poem, concluding with a discussion of how the Shelley circle aestheticized the poet after his death.Shelley and His Readers offers a new approach to the question of how to recuperate Romantic idealism in the face of challenges from both deconstructive and historicist criticism. Its innovative use of receptionbased analysis will make this book invaluable not only to specialists of the Romantic period but also to anyone interested in new developments in literary criticism.
⚠️ WARNING (California Proposition 65):
This product may contain chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm.
For more information, please visit www.P65Warnings.ca.gov.