In "Shelley and His Readers, " the first full-length critical
analysis of the dialogue between Shelley's poetry and its
contemporary reviewers, Kim Wheatley argues that Shelley's idealism
can be recovered through the study of his poetry's reception.
Incorporating extensive research in major early-nineteenth-century
British periodicals, Wheatley integrates a reception-based
methodology with careful textual analysis to demonstrate that the
early reception of Shelley's work registers the immediate impact of
the poet's increasingly idealistic passion for reforming the
world.
Wheatley examines Shelley's poetry within the context of
Romantic-era "paranoid politics," a simultaneously empowering and
disabling dynamic in which the reviewers employ a heightened
language of defensiveness and persecution that paints their
adversaries as Satanic rebels against orthodoxy. This "paranoid
style" displays a preoccupation with the efficacy of the printed
word and singles out radical writers such as Shelley as sources of
social contamination.
Using Shelley's "Queen Mab" to illustrate his early radicalism,
Wheatley demonstrates that the poet, like his contemporary
reviewers, is caught up in paranoid rhetoric. Failing to challenge
the assumptions underlying the paranoid style-conspiracy and
contagion-in this poem Shelley takes merely a defiant, oppositional
stance. However, Shelley's later poems, exemplified by "Prometheus
Unbound" and "Adonais, " circumvent the reviewers' rhetoric through
their boldly experimental language, a process registered by the
reviewers' own responses. These less explicitly political poems
transcend the dynamics of cultural paranoia by shifting to an
apolitical conception of the aesthetic. In collaboration with its
early readers, Shelley's poetry thus moves momentarily beyond
paranoid politics.
The final chapter of this study argues that the posthumous
reception of "Adonais" uniquely replicates the elegiac moves and
complex idealism of the poem, concluding with a discussion of how
the Shelley circle aestheticized the poet after his death.
"Shelley and His Readers" offers a new approach to the question
of how to recuperate Romantic idealism in the face of challenges
from both deconstructive and historicist criticism. Its innovative
use of reception-based analysis will make this book invaluable not
only to specialists of the Romantic period but also to anyone
interested in new developments in literary criticism.
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