• English & American cultural studies
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.149-207
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• 2010

Written simultaneously with Prometheus Unbound, Shelley's "Julian & Maddalo" is a masterwork of dramatic poiesis, of doubling embedded in its couplets, dialogic debate on human nature and contrasted symbolic emblems. The emblems mirror each other and are themselves sites of generative paradox: the "heaven illumined" but "dreary tower" of the Maniac and the glorious sunsets on the "ever-shifting sand" of the Lido, a wasteland that is a place of self discovery but also of "abandonment" and barren mingling figured, inter alia, in its "amphibious weeds," a trope of the poem's personae. This essay also explores the poem's dramatic structure and various rhetorical devices, beginning with the Preface, a threshold of complex identity disguise that Shelley uses for veiled self-presentation, as in "Alastor," mirroring and literary references replete with nuanced ironies. I focus mainly on the complex figures of liminality Shelley uses to develop his own thoughts (as well as his ongoing debates with Byron) about man's potential for growth in thought, insight and empathy, in political reform and interpersonal and individual healing. Advancing Shelley's most optimistic ideas, Julian, escorted by Maddalo observes the Maniac, -- a living ruin whose pained eloquence reveals the link of eros to poiesis and the limits of the latter's ability to 'transform a world.' The Maniac is the core of muse-work (remembering, thinking and song) and Shelley presents him as its emblem. He also is prefigured in and reflects the quintessentially liminal Lido with its "barren embrace" of sea and land. Yet it is less the Maniac's feeling that his grief is "charactered in vain…on this unfeeling leaf" than Julian's rationales for leaving the site of pain that point to Shelley's final comment on poetry's transformative limits. As the primary haploids of the drama's meiosis re-combine and two of them, Maddalo and the maniac fall away, an analogy I briefly develop and embedded in the erotic dynamics of poiesis, Shelley suggests, as he did at the beginning of his poetic lyricism in "Alastor" and at its end in "the Triumph of Life"that images mislead and delude; that "the deep truth is imageless" and redemption is not in but beyond figuration.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.4
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• pp.667-690
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• 2010

This essay attempts to read Percy Bysshe Shelley s The Mask of Anarchy by attending to a political agenda that Shelley seeks to propose and embody in the poem. This poem was written as a response to an exceptional political event, the Peterloo Massacre, and thus it is evident that Shelley intended to engage in contemporary politics by writing this poem. As many critics have pointed out, however, the way in which this poem addresses social, plitical issues is ambivalent and even confusing, since it contains many elements that contradict each other, and sometimes its political visions are based on incoherent conceptions. For this reason, this poem has been considered to be a failure as an occasional poem which should provide the reader with a clear direction for political actions. Faced with this critical problem, this essay proposes that the ambivalence this poem reveals-e.g., the confrontation between moderate artistic fantasy and radical tenets-is not a retreat from political activism, as some critics suggested, but a result of its creation and embodiment of a public sphere which invites various social classes and their positions. The mode in which Shelley conceives this unified public sphere in the course of writing The Mask of Anarchy can be interpreted in terms of the following three features. First, this poem underscores the significance of thoughts in constituting a communal space between people, thus asking the reader to participate in this process of thinking on given issues. Second, this poem suggests that people should enlighten each other by engaging in communicative reciprocations. Lastly, the public sphere formulated by the previous two features should incorporate various socio-political agents beyond class boundaries (even oppressors themselves) into its own working field. After explaining how these three features are manifested in the poem, this essay argues that the unified public sphere thus formed in the poem is the very agenda that Shelley aims to propose for the contemporaneous politics and culture. As a conclusion, this essay highlights how Shelley s project of creating a unified public sphere finally failed in contemporary history through observing two contrasting receptions of Shelley s works.