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16 results

  • 7 - Hopeless Romanticism

  • Edited by Omar F. Miranda, University of San Francisco, Kate Singer, Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts
  • Book:
    Percy Shelley for Our Times
    Published online:
    07 March 2024
    Print publication:
    14 March 2024, pp 156-175

  • Summary

    This chapter identifies a strain of political, affective maladjustment it labels “Hopeless Romanticism,” of which Percy Bysshe Shelley is an exemplary case. It argues that hope plays a fundamental role in the progressivist refusal to abide by the terms of the status quo. Hopeless romantics hold on to visions of a better world in spite of the crushing realities that surround them. This chapter tracks how this affective mechanism manifests in a series of Shelleyan poems where hope leaps past probabilistic boundaries, even as the despair that is hope’s other side repeatedly intrudes. Hope’s structural investment in futurity has made it both a symptom of weakened individual agency and a social portent of political change.

  • Chapter 11 - Orientalism

  • from Part II - Political, Social and Intellectual Transformations
  • Edited by Clara Tuite, University of Melbourne
  • Book:
    Byron in Context
    Published online:
    04 October 2019
    Print publication:
    05 December 2019, pp 93-100

  • Summary

    Ever since the appearance of Edward Said’s postcolonial tour de force, Orientalism (1978), Byron’s taste for Eastern characters and settings has provoked much commentary from scholars. Byron, after all, spent a large part of his poetic career depicting the contemporary and historical Middle East, starting with Canto II of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), through the Turkish tales of 1813–14 (The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara) to his Assyrian historical drama Sardanapalus (1821) and Don Juan’s Greek and Turkish cantos (1819–23).

Radical Orientalism
  • Rights, Reform, and Romanticism
  • Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud
  • Published online:
    05 July 2015
    Print publication:
    30 July 2015
  • This fascinating study reveals the extent to which the Orientalism of Byron and the Shelleys resonated with the reformist movement of the Romantic era. It documents how and why radicals like Bentham, Cobbett, Carlile, Hone and Wooler, among others in post-Revolutionary Britain, invoked Turkey, North Africa and Mughal India when attacking and seeking to change their government's domestic policies. Examining a broad archive ranging from satires, journalism, tracts, political and economic treatises, and public speeches, to the exotic poetry and fictions of canonical Romanticism, Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud shows that promoting colonization was not Orientalism's sole ideological function. Equally vital was its aesthetic and rhetorical capacity to alienate the people's affection from their rulers and fuel popular opposition to regressive taxation, penal cruelty, police repression, and sexual regulation.