Shelley's Process: Radical Transference and the Development of His Major Works

by Jerrold E. Hogle

Overview

In this set of thorough and revisionary readings of Percy Bysshe Shelley's best-known writings in verse and prose, Hogle argues that the logic and style in all these works are governed by a movement in every thought, memory, image, or word-pattern whereby each is seen and sees itself in terms of a radically different form. For any specified entity or figure to be known for "what it is," it must be reconfigured by and in terms of another one at another level (which must then be dislocated itself). In so delineating Shelley's "process," Hogle reveals the revisionary procedure in the poet's various texts and demonstrates the powerful effects of "radical transference" in Shelley's visions of human possibility.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195054866
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	01/12/1989
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.38(w) x 9.56(h) x 1.18(d)

About the Author

University of Arizona, Tucson

Table of Contents

	Introduction. The Logic of Transposition	3
	The Mysteries in Shelley	3
	The Dominant Critical Response	7
	The Actual Provenance of Shelley's Writing	9
	Naming the Subliminal Impulse	15
	Some Affiliated Approaches and Where They Stop	18
	The Argument That Transference Demands	24
1.	Early Attachments: From the "Gothic Sensibility" to "Natural Piety" and Alastor	28
	A Quest for Substitutes	28
	The Gothic Dichotomy and the Deistic Answer	29
	From "Power" to "Necessity,"	35
	The Problem of Wordsworth and Coleridge: Attraction and Repulsion	39
	The Hidden Imperative in All These Systems	43
	Facing the Impulse and Its Possibilities: Alastor	45
	Shelley at His Point of Departure	57
2.	The Poles of Being and the Surpassing of Precursors: The "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" and "Mont Blanc,"	59
	New Versions of Old Quandaries	59
	Building a Hymn from Dislocations	62
	The Outward Turn of Beauty's Power	70
	"Mont Blanc": The Primal Clinaman	73
	A Doubtful Belief: Its Rationale and Style	79
	Beyond Polarity	85
3.	The Key to All Tyrannies: From Laon and Cythna to The Cenci	87
	Transference's Self-Reversal	87
	The Existing Accounts of the Error	89
	Narcissism and the Gaze of the Other in Laon and Cythna	96
	The Will to Knowledge and the Feminist Critique in Prometheus Unbound	103
	The "Madness" of Objectification: Julian and Maddalo Through the Lenses of "On Life,"	112
	Mimetic Desire and Its Various Dangers: Julian and Maddalo, The Mask of Anarchy, and Peter Bell the Third	130
	The Modes Combined: The Cenci as Shelley's Great Expose	147
	The Process of Abjection	162
4.	Unchaining Mythography: Prometheus Unbound and Its Aftermath	167
	The Anti-Mythologist	167
	Prometheus as Transference: What Confines and Liberates Him	172
	The Nature, Education, and Re-Mobilization of Asia	182
	Transference Unbound in Acts 3 and 4: The Shelleyan Hope and Techniques for Projecting It	192
	The Reemergent Intertext and the Mythographic Lyrics	202
	Free Mythography in Action: "The Witch of Atlas,"	211
	The Social Role of Shelley's Anti-Myth	220
5.	The Distribution of Transference: A Philosophical View of Reform and Its Satellites	222
	The Crisis of Shelley's Moment and His Gradualist Solution	222
	The Real Function of Equalization	229
	The Realienation of Work--And the Limits of Shelley's Proto-Marxism	234
	How the Language of Legality Can Free People from the Law	242
	The Unbinding of the Political Association	250
	Transference Made Practical: The View as an Epitome of Shelley's Career	259
6.	The "One" in the Later Works: "Thought's Eternal Flight,"	263
	A Late Reorientation?	263
	The Translations as Recoveries of the Repressed	266
	The One as Progressive Conflation: "On Life" and the Defense of Poetry	272
	The One as a Fusion of Opposites: Epipsychidion	279
	The One as Another Plane: "The Sensitive-Plant" and Hellas	286
	The One as the Image of Death: Adonais	294
	Adonais as the Confluence of Two "Eternal Flights,"	307
	The One as Its Different Forms in Tandem and as a Poser of Questions: The Triumph of Life	319
	Notes	343
	Index	401

Editorial Reviews

"Hogle brings an impressive breadth and depth of learning to the development of an intriguing and original argument about the nature of Sshelley's work."—Modern Philology

"Hogle's style—its capacity for supple inflections, conceptual agility, and alertness to implication—frequently impresses, even delights....There is no questioning the energy and intelligence with which it demonstrates the operations of transference in Shelley's work. It is, quite simply, one of the most significant books ever written about the poet."—Wordsworth Circle

"The most ambitious study of Shelley since Wasserman's, one that seems destined to energize a new critical generation through its dynamic intellectual power. No previous critic of Shelley has been as able to balance the daunting range of his poetic refinement and political radicalism. The chapter on Prometheus Unbound and the mythographic poetry is the highest ground ever reached by Shelley criticism, a combination of exemplary critical assimilation, deep learnedness, and penetrating acumen. Though no critical book is ever exactly definitive, Hogle has dared such a comparison. Shelley's Process will be an essential reservoir for the study of the poet and his period for as long as one can conceive."—Stuart Curran, University of Pennsylvania

"The most intellectual challenging book on Shelley since Earl R. Wasserman's Shelley: A Critical (1971). Future critics of the poet, whether or not they agree with Hogle's thesis and the readings that evoke from it, will have to come to terms with his study, in which they will find important information gleaned from recent Shelley scholarship."—Modern Language Quarterly

"Hogle has a profound knowledge of the literature Shelly knew, and his readings are always intense, never inane. His published essays have been provocative and influential. This deep and wide study of Shelly will meet with a like response."—Studies in Romanticism

From the Publisher