Shelley, Percy Bysshe | Shelley Wall (essay date 1994)
Shelley Wall (essay date 1994)
SOURCE: “Baffled Narrative in Julian and Maddalo,” in New Romanticisms: Theory and Critical Practice, University of Toronto Press, 1994, pp. 52-68.
[In the following essay, Wall focuses on the dynamics of narrative suppression in Shelley's poem Julian and Maddalo.]
I
I rode one evening with Count Maddalo Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow Of Adria towards Venice: a bare strand Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand …
Is this …
(ll. 1-4, 7)
Thus begins Shelley's Julian and Maddalo. The dichotomy between Julian's simultaneous freedom of movement—on horseback with his powerful Byronic friend the count—and his situation at a point of interruption—on ‘the bank of land which breaks the flow / Of Adria towards Venice’—prefigures the poem's shifting narrative sands.
The poem's subtitle, ‘A Conversation,’ appears...
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