This volume of five essays focus on how the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley uses and modifies Gothic conventions across his whole writing career so as, on the one hand, to extend the limits of the Gothic, shading it into a wider Romanticism, and, on the other, to press the limits of the Gothic down to their most basic foundations, releasing new potentials. These essays all argue in different way that, by the end of his career, Shelley has proposed an answer to the question: what does Gothic writing most basically assume in its mixtures of previous genres, and how do these assumptions both establish its limits and set the stage for transgressing them?
Abstract
This paper begins with the Gothic, exemplified in Shelley’s early Gothic novels Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, as an overdetermined and unprocessed moment that interrupts aesthetic ideology, and that is problematically entwined with the Romantic in ways that help to illuminate the deconstructive role that the Gothic has come to play in Romantic Studies.
Abstract
The persistent use of Gothic motifs by Shelley from his early Gothic novels (1810-11) all the way to The Triumph of Life (1822) has only been partly explained up until now. This essay argues that Shelley develops, across his career in ways especially visible in The Triumph, a "Gothic complex" of connected features that look all the way back to how the "Gothic Story" began in Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764). By developing these features as he does, Shelley is able to reveal with great power the underlying conflicts at his (and our) time be
Between Saints and Monsters: Elegy, Materialization, and Gothic Historiography in Percy Shelley’s Adonais and The Wandering Jew
Christopher BundockAbstract
Building on Jerrold E. Hogle's thinking about Gothic historiography and Julia Lupton's analysis of Renaissance hagiography, this paper explores the Gothic as a reliquary of sorts where rejected and outdated forms of historical consciousness persist beyond the moment of their ostensible viability. Shelley's Adonais (1821) and The Wandering Jew (1810), I argue, demonstrate how historical thought itself is haunted by elements that cannot enter into history proper.
Shelley’s Zastrozzi, A Romance: Anti-Jacobin Paranoiac Fantasy and the Semblance of Subversion
David BrookshireAbstract
When Shelley published Zastrozzi in 1810, its Gothic conventions had already become a target of satire in the wake of anti-Jacobin polemics against the revolutionary zeal expressed in the “Pamphlet Wars” (1790-91). Although Shelley was entering an ideological battle that had apparently already been won by reactionary anti-Jacobin forces, conservative paranoia provided a target-rich environment for a transgressive aesthetic that played upon fears of persecution, conspiracy, and libertinism.
Abstract
According to the period’s dominant imaginary conspiracy was ‘totalizing’; it explained everything. Against this was the urgent task of imaging a form of agency that could effectively countermand the spirit of tyranny. Why was the Gothic necessary for Shelley? Part of our answer lies in the fact that Gothic precedents addressed both these crucial points. At the heart of the post-Walpolian Gothic’s ‘symbolic constitution’ lies the ‘dead hand of the past’, a metaphor for the way the past not only reaches into the present, but holds it in its palsied grip.