"Shelley found a retreat on the Bay of Lerici where, joined by his friends Edward and Jane Williams, he sailed his new boat and confided darkening thoughts to Edward Trelawny. Shelley's love lyrics to Jane, his last inamorata, were written as he composed his final great work, The Triumph of Life, broken off by his untimely drowning, a controversial sailing tragedy that is considered here in detail. Shelley's fascinating posthumous life is narrated in the subsequent intermingled lives of the poet's most intimate associates."--BOOK JACKET.

Garland's magnificent facsimile series of the manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in the Bodleian Library, Oxford ( The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts , 22 volumes, 1986-1997) is now made complete by the publication of its Index-volume. Volume XXIII provides the key to the contents of the Shelleyan notebooks and papers in all their complexity: poems, prose, translations, fragments, calculations, drawing and doodles, addresses and other miscellaneous jottings. The accumulated findings provide a treasure-trove of information about the Shelley's lives: their writings and readings, and echoes of classical and later authors; the people they met, corresponded with, rented houses from, or saw perform; the towns they visited, the very houses in which they lived, the lakes and rivers they sailed and the mountains they climbed. The intellectual and physical data of these manuscripts will help open new vistas for students of their lives, thought and creative writing.

First published in 2002. This book surveys how and to what effect Shelley uses erotic narratives to mask political rhetoric within his attempts to describe and bring forth utopia. Posing erotic relationships as both an exemplar of the inequities of power and a paradigm for alternative social orders that dismantle oppressive structures, it argues Shelley’s work imagines a space where the rigidity of tyranny succumbs to the liberation of ecstatic union. From the Romantics to the Aesthetes, it argues that this model contributed to a counter-tradition in British literature which situates the erotic as a trope for political discourse. This work will be of interest to students of literature.

The fiery, provocative, and unparalleled work of feminist art criticism that launched the exceptional career of one of our most important public intellectuals—"a remarkable book, at once outrageous and compelling, fanatical and brilliant.... One must be awed by [Paglia's] vast energy, erudition and wit" (The Washington Post). Is Emily Dickinson “the female Sade”? Is Donatello’s David a bit of pedophile pornography? What is the secret kinship between Byron and Elvis Presley, between Medusa and Madonna? How do liberals and feminists—as well as conservatives—fatally misread human nature? This audacious and omnivorously learned work of guerrilla scholarship offers nothing less than a unified-field theory of Western culture, high and low, since Egyptians invented beauty—making a persuasive case for all art as a pagan battleground between male and female, form and chaos, civilization and daemonic nature. With 47 photographs.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was one of the major Romantic poets, and wrote what is critically recognised as some of the finest lyric poetry in the English language. This is the fourth volume of the five-volume The Poems of Shelley, which presents all of Shelley’s poems in chronological order and with full annotation. Date and circumstances of composition are provided for each poem and all manuscript and printed sources relevant to establishing an authoritative text are freshly examined and assessed. Headnotes and footnotes furnish the personal, literary, historical and scientific information necessary to an informed reading of Shelley’s varied and allusive verse. Most of the poems in the present volume were written between late autumn 1820 and late summer 1821. They include Adonais, Shelley’s lament on the death of John Keats, widely recognised as one of the finest elegies in English poetry, as well as Epipsychidion, a poem inspired by his relationship with the nineteen-year-old Teresa Viviani (‘Emilia’), the object of an intense but temporary fascination for Shelley. The poems of this period show the extent both of Shelley’s engagement with Keats’s volume Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820) — a copy of which he first read in October 1820 — and of his interest in Italian history, culture and politics. Shelley’s translations of some of his own poems into Italian and his original compositions in the language are also included here. In addition to accompanying commentaries, there are extensive bibliographies to the poems, a chronological table of Shelley’s life and publications, and indexes to titles and first lines. The volumes of The Poems of Shelley form the most comprehensive edition of Shelley’s poetry available to students and scholars.

Deftly probing the ambivalence of Romantic writers on the subjects of "passion" and "beauty," Robinson shows how this ambivalence is also central to the experience of the modern critic in Western society. Is the reader's experience of beauty in art an escape from troubling reality? Or does desire for beauty spur social criticism and reform? Does the representation of erotic passion, as a sign of social critique, exist to be transcended for disinterested spirituality? Or is such passion the very site of the struggle for individual and class rights? Robinson explores the problematic place of passion and beauty in Romanticism's radical sentiments and reformist politics. Tracing the intertwining of desire and disturbance, of eros and subversion, his meditations encompass poems, novels, diaries; key terms (such as Rousseau's "sentiment of existence"); writers' characteristic forms of expression or habits of mind (Wordsworth's "or"-grammar); figures in literary works (Goethe's Werther, Byron's Lambro); problems of genre (the relationship of the Romantic poem and the Romantic essay, the problem of closure, the nature of a "scene"); and larger political questions (feminism in Romantic literature, erotic passion and representations of radicalism). Evoking the original meaning of "essay" as experiment, Robinson has essayed a topography of the Romantic landscape. "This book is daring and it is brilliant. I also think it is right."--James R. Kincaid, University of Southern California

An analysis of Shelley's fiction, poetry, and letters covers the topics of narcissism, gender identity, and self-idolotry.