Percy Shelley for Our Times

Two centuries after Percy Shelley's death, this volume explores his continuing collaborations with audiences across spaces and times.

Omar F. Miranda (Edited by), Kate Singer (Edited by)

9781009206532, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 14 March 2024

306 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.2 cm, 0.6 kg

'Various as they are in method and topic, the chapters are remarkably consistent in their adventurousness. The editors deserve credit: the contributors evidently felt comfortable taking risks with argument and style.' Stephen Tedeschi, European Romantic Review

Two centuries after Percy Shelley's death, his writings continue to resonate in remarkable ways. Shelley addressed climate change, women's liberation, nonbinary gender, and political protest, while speaking to Indigenous, queer/trans, disabled, displaced, and working-class communities. He still inspires artists and social justice movements around the world today. Yet Percy Shelley for Our Times reveals an even more farsighted writer, one whose poetic methodology went beyond the didactic powers of prophetic art. Not historicist, presentist, or transhistorical, Shelley 'for our times' conceives worlds outside himself, his poetry, and his era, envisioning how audiences connect and collaborate across space and time. This collection revitalizes a writer once considered an adolescent of idealist protest, showing how his interwoven poetics of relationality continually revisits the meaning of community and the contemporary. This title is part of the Flip it Open programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Notes on contributors
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction: Percy Shelley's involving poetics of relationality Omar F. Miranda and Kate Singer
1. Shelley, treaty-making, and Indigenous poetry Nikki Hessell
2. Waiting for the Revolution: age, debility, and disability in The Triumph of Life Fuson Wang
3. 'A Chamæleonic Race': Shelley and the discourses of slavery Mathelinda Nabugodi
4. Dream defenders and the inside songs Julie A. Carlson
5. Radical suffering: Shelley's legacy in nonviolent revolution James Chandler
6. Loathsome Sympathy: Shelley's The Cenci and the Problem of Empathy Alan Richardson
7. Hopeless romanticism Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud
8. Percy Shelley's sad exile Omar F. Miranda
9. Shelley in the overgrowth Ross Wilson
10. Creatrix witches, nonbinary creatures, and Shelleyan transmedia Kate Singer
11. Action at a distance: communication and material entanglement in Queen Mab and The Mask of Anarchy Mary Fairclough
12. Educating the imagination / defending Shelley defending Joel Faflak
Further reading bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]