Poet/censor/reader: Shelley's struggle for a popular reading audience

"One consequence of the anti-Jacobin fervor that swept England after 1789 was an increasingly aggressive machinery for the suppression of radical thinking and writing. Since it worked to excise any direct political criticism from public discourse, this baldly ideological censorship had a far-reaching (and often overlooked) influence on the forms of romantic literature. In fact, censorship is one of the key social forces which furthered the establishment of ""literature"" as a specifically ""imaginary"" discursive form concerned more with ""eternal Truths"" and ""ideals"" than with the muck and mire of real, historically contingent human affairs. Focusing primarily on Shelley's early works--Queen Mab, Alastor, and The Revolt of Islam--the dissertation explores the development of ""literature"" as exemplified by Shelley's poetic practice. Shelley's work offers an excellent text for such a study precisely because the writing is schizophrenic, sometimes commenting pointedly on contemporary social and political events and sometimes retreating to the remarkably obscure and highly imaginative forms often celebrated (or bemoaned) as Shelley's ""mythmaking."" This discursive schizophrenia, I argue, is symptomatic of Shelley's effort to unite poetic and political discourses and to communicate his fundamentally social vision to a popular reading audience despite the dominant culture's efforts, through a rigorous press censorship, to stifle or contain such vocal opposition."

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Literature, English

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2011

Author dc:creator

• Grimes, Leonard Kyle

Contributors dc:contributor

• Stillinger, Jack

• Literature, English

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 1990 Grimes, Leonard Kyle

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

AAI9026195
(UMI)AAI9026195

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/23637