This volume takes as its starting point a 2001 volume in the Romantic Circles Praxis Series, Reading Shelley’s Interventionist Poetry, 1819-1820, in which volume-editor Michael Scrivener, employing Theodor Adorno's terminology, identifies a binary in Shelley's "interventionist" work: the "antinomy of commitment and autonomy." Asking what it means for a work of art to intervene in its immediate political context, this volume asserts the necessity of seeing through and beyond the antinomy of political commitment and artistic autonomy by rereading and reimagining the political in Shelley’s writings and his legacy. Indeed, the essays in this volume chart new political possibilities in our estimation of Shelley’s body of work—pathways that take us back to post-Peterloo repression through to the Victorian Shelleyans, and then forward to Jacques Rancière’s post-Marxism.
Abstract
Shelley's political legacy passed through an often-neglected school of writers to world leaders and revolutionaries globally in the decades following his death. When assessing his legacy, we should not overlook those early, ardent appreciators known as "the Spasmodic School." Alexander Smith, Sydney Dobell, J. Stanyan Bigg, and even James Thomson B.V. took Shelley's call to a revolution conducted through imaginative sympathy seriously, and together, helped to fan his "fading coal" to flame.
Remembering John Cahuac: Post-Peterloo Repression and the Fate of Radical-Romantic Satire
Michael DemsonAbstract
In the short run, government prosecution of radical publishers after Peterloo affected literary sensibilities of late Romanticism, evident in the fall in popularity of political satire in the 1820s. In the long run, government repression, by silencing dissent, shaped the canon of radical and Romantic literature. This essay explores the forgotten career of the radical satirist and publisher, John Cahuac, cut short by his transportation.
Abstract
This essay argues for a close relationship between Shelley's aesthetics and the modern concept of nonviolence. By reading Shelley with Theodor Adorno and Jacques Rancière, the essay establishes a critical Romantic nonviolence at the core of their aesthetic theories.
Abstract
Given the resurgence of interest in the relation between Shelley’s political essays and poetry, what concept of relationality can be posed to move beyond an old, entrenched opposition between the social commitment of prose and the abstract withdrawal of poetry to theorize a novel form of “political poetics”?
Abstract
This essay reads Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Mask of Anarchy in the context of the resurgence of critical interest in anarchist theory. The essay meditates on how recent developments in anarchist-related critical theory, specifically the work of Jacques Rancière, make visible an aesthetics of anarchism.