Shelley's Visual Imagination

by Nancy Moore Goslee

Overview

Shelley's drafts and notebooks, which have recently been published for the first time, are very revealing about the creative processes behind his poems, and show – through illustrations and doodles – an unexpectedly vivid visual imagination which contributed in a major way to the effect of his poetry. Shelley's Visual Imagination analyzes both verbal script and visual sketches in his manuscripts to interpret the lively personifications of concepts such as 'Liberty', 'Anarchy', or 'Life' in his completed poems. Challenging the persistent assumption that Shelley's poetry in particular and Romantic poetry more generally reject the visual for expressive voice or music, this study combines criticism with a focus upon bibliographic codes and iconic pages. The product of years of study, this much-anticipated book will be of great value for all students of Shelley.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107698611
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	03/20/2014
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Romanticism , #90
Pages:	292
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.63(d)

About the Author

Nancy Goslee is Professor of English Emerita at the University of Tennessee.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: text and figure; 2. Mab's metamorphoses; 3. 'Hymn to intellectual beauty': visual texts, invisible figure; 4. 'Clear elemental shapes': textual and cultural origins for liberty in the Laon and Cythna notebooks; 5. Anarchy's textual progress: representing liberty; 6. Pursuing revision in Shelley's 'Ode to Liberty'; 7. Dispersoning Emily: drafting as plot in Epipsychidion; 8. 'Compelling/All new successions': death and the poet's figurations in Adonais; 9. The Triumph of Life: figure, history, and inscription.