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Percy Bysshe Shelley

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  • Keats-Shelley Journal. New York: Keats-Shelley Association of America, 1952-. (An annual publication devoted to studies on Keats, Shelley, Byron, and their circles. A detailed bibliography is included in the periodical.)
  • Abbey, Lloyd. Destroyer and Preserver: Shelley's Poetic Skepticism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979, 171 p. (Seeks to demonstrate the skepticism of Shelley's philosophy.)
  • Allott, Miriam, ed. Essays on Shelley. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1982, 282 p. (Contains discussions of both individual works and such general topics as Shelley's critical reputation and his Gothicism.)
  • Allsup, James O. The Magic Circle: A Study of Shelley's Concept of Love. National University Publications, Literary Criticism Series, edited by John E. Becker. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1976, 115 p. (Discovers a combination of Christian and platonic ideas in Shelley's writings on love.)
  • An, Young-Ok. "Beatrice's Gaze Revisited: Anatomizing The Cenci." In Criticism XXXVIII, No. 1 (Winter 1996): 27-68. (Offers a feminist reading of The Cenci that probes the “complex operations of violence, law, and desire that intersect with gender issues” in the work.)
  • Austin, Timothy R. "Narrative Transmission: Shifting Gears in Shelley's ‘Ozymandias’." In Dialogue and Critical Discourse: Language, Culture, Critical Theory, edited by Michael Macovski, pp. 29-46. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. (Syntactic analysis of Shelley's poem “Ozymandias” that endeavors to reassess the work “as a sophisticated and even daring poetic creation.”)
  • Barcus, James E., ed. Shelley: The Critical Heritage. The Critical Heritage Series, edited by B. C. Southam. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975, 432 p. (Reprints early critical assessments of Shelley's work.)
  • Barnard, Ellsworth. Shelley's Religion. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1937, 320 p. (An extended exploration of Shelley's religious beliefs.)
  • Barrell, Joseph. Shelley and the Thought of His Time: A Study in the History of Ideas. 1947. Reprint. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1967, 207 p. (Examines the extent to which Shelley's life and works reflected early nineteenth-century philosophical trends.)
  • Blood, Roger. "Allegory and Dramatic Representation in The Cenci." In Studies in Romanticism 33, No. 3 (Fall 1994): 355-89. (Summarizes contemporary critical estimation of Shelley's verse drama The Cenci and interprets the work from a representational rather than an aesthetic vantage point.)
  • Bloom, Harold, et al. Deconstruction and Criticism. New York: Seabury Press, A Continuum Book, 1979, 256 p. (Includes two important essays on Shelley, Paul de Man's "Shelley Disfigured" and J. Hillis Miller's "The Critic as Host.")
  • Bloom, Harold. Shelley's Mythmaking. Yale Studies in English, edited by Benjamin Christie Nangle, vol. 141. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959, 279 p. (Considers Shelley as primarily a mythopoeic poet.)
  • Blunden, Edmund. Shelley: A Life Story. London: Collins, 1946, 320 p. (A popular biography.)
  • Brewer, William D. "The Cenci and Sad Reality." In The Shelley-Byron Conversation, pp. 56-76. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. (Contrasts the differing views of dramatic principles held by Shelley and Lord Byron.)
  • Brigham, Linda C. "The Postmodern Semiotics of Prometheus Unbound." In Studies in Romanticism 33, No. 1 (Spring 1994): 31-56. (Emphasizes Shelley's demonstration of changes in the “technology of reference” in Prometheus Unbound.)
  • Brinkley, Robert. "Spaces Between Words: Writing Mont Blanc." In Romantic Revisions, edited by Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley, pp. 243-67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. (Recounts the interrupted sequence in Shelley's writing and revising of Mont Blanc.)
  • Brown, Nathaniel. Sexuality and Feminism in Shelley. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979, 298 p. (Presents Shelley as a proponent of sexual equality whose writings anticipate modern attitudes toward sexuality.)
  • Cameron, Kenneth Neill, and Reiman, Donald H., eds. Shelley and His Circle, 1773–1822. 8 vols. to date. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961-. (Provides bibliographical and critical material on Shelley, Mary Shelley, Byron, Hunt, and Peacock.)
  • Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Shelley: The Golden Years. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974, 669 p. (An acclaimed two-part account of Shelley's intellectual development and writings covering the period from 1809 to 1822.)
  • Campbell, Olwen Ward. Shelley and the Unromantics. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1924, 307 p. (One of the first studies of Shelley's personality and thought based primarily on his letters and other writings.)
  • Carey, Gillian. Shelley. Literature in Perspective, edited by Kenneth Grose. London: Evans Brothers, 1975, 160 p. (An introductory survey of Shelley's life and works.)
  • Clarke, Eric O. "Shelley's Heart: Sexual Politics and Cultural Value." In The Yale Journal of Criticism 8, No. 1 (Spring 1995): 187-208. (Explores the relationship between textual scholarship of Shelley's works and fetishism for his reputedly androgyne body.)
  • Cronin, Richard. Shelley's Poetic Thoughts. London: Macmillan Press, 1981, 263 p. (A highly regarded discussion of Shelley's use of language and poetic forms.)
  • Crook, Nora, and Guiton, Derek. Shelley's Venomed Melody. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, 273 p. (A study of Shelley's concern with disease, particularly syphilis, and his own state of health.)
  • Curran, Stuart. "The Political Prometheus." In Spirits of Fire: English Romantic Writers and Contemporary Historical Methods, edited by G. A. Rosso and Daniel P. Watkins, pp. 260-84. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1990. (Considers Shelley's representation of Prometheus as a hero for the politically oppressed.)
  • Curran, Stuart. Shelley's Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic Vision. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1975, 255 p. (Focuses on the poems Shelley wrote in 1819 and 1820, emphasizing his use of myth.)
  • Dawson, P. M. S. The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980, 312 p. (Examines Shelley's political interests and attitudes in their historical context.)
  • Dunbar, Clement. A Bibliography of Shelley Studies: 1823–1950. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, vol. 32. New York: Garland Publishing, 1976, 320 p. (A guide to Shelley studies dating from his death to 1950.)
  • Endo, Paul. "The Cenci: Recognizing the Shelleyan Sublime." In Texas Studies in Literature and Language 38, Nos. 3-4 (Fall-Winter 1996): 379-97. (Comments on Shelley's refusal to moralize on the subject of self-knowledge in The Cenci.)
  • Farnell, Gary. "Rereading Shelley." ELH 60, No. 3 (Fall 1993): 625-50. (Studies the autobiographical and psychoanalytic implications of shell imagery in Laon and Cythna, Prometheus Unbound, and the Homeric Hymn to Mercury.)
  • Finch, Peter. "Shelley's Laon and Cythna: The Bride Stripped Bare … Almost." In The Keats-Shelley Review No. 3 (Autumn 1988): 23-46. (Focuses on the political and ethical purpose behind Shelley's dramatization of the love affair in Laon and Cythna.)
  • Foot, Paul. "Shelley's Revolutionary Year." In Ambient Fears: Random Access 2, edited by Pavel Büchler and Nikos Papastergiadis, pp. 31-45. London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996. (Discusses Shelley's attempts to publish the radical, political poetry comprising his Philosophical View of Reform.)
  • Foss, Chris. "Shelley's Revolution in Poetic Language: A Kristevan Reading of Act IV to Prometheus Unbound." In European Romantic Review 9, No. 4 (Fall 1998): 501-18. (Applies the theories of Julia Kristeva to Prometheus Unbound in order to observe the work's representation of the revolutionary potential of poetic language.)
  • Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth. "Seeing Through Mirrors (Prometheus Unbound, Act I)." In Shelley's Goddess: Maternity, Language, Subjectivity, pp. 137-69. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. (Psychoanalytic reading of Prometheus Unbound, which views the work as a resonant series of mirrorings.)
  • Grabo, Carl. "Prometheus Unbound": An Interpretation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935, 205 p. (An interpretive study of Shelley's imagery in Prometheus Unbound focusing on his revolutionary social philosophy, neoplatonism, and interest in scientific experimentation.)
  • Grabo, Carl. The Magic Plant: The Growth of Shelley's Thought. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936, 450 p. (Examines Shelley's ideology as manifested in his writings. This study helped influence the revival of interest in Shelley's works in the twentieth century.)
  • Grimes, Kyle. "Queen Mab, the Law of Libel, and the Forms of Shelley's Politics." In Journal of English and Germanic Philology 94, No. 5 (January 1995): 1-18. (Analyzes Queen Mab within the context of contemporary censorship of public political speech.)
  • Haines, Simon. "Shelley's ‘West Wind’: Power or Weakness?" In The Critical Review, No. 30 (1990): 112-26. (Sees in the “Ode to the West Wind” indications of Shelley's awareness of his own imaginative weakness.)
  • Herson, Ellen Brown. "Oxymoron and Dante's Gates of Hell in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound." In Studies in Romanticism 29, No. 3 (Fall 1990): 371-93. (Dissects the rhetorical structures of antithesis and oxymoron in Prometheus Unbound.)
  • Hogg, Thomas Jefferson. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. London: London Library, 1906, 585 p. (A controversial biography of Shelley originally published in 1858. Hogg has been criticized for altering his sources and for maliciously misrepresenting Shelley; nonetheless, his work had an important influence on the poet's reputation.)
  • Jacobs, Carol. "Unbinding Words: Prometheus Unbound." In Uncontainable Romanticism: Shelley, Brontë, Kleist, pp. 19-57. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. (Interprets Prometheus Unbound not as a dramatic representation of the origins of speech and thought but a “performance of perpetual if unpredictable revolution.”)
  • Janowitz, Anne. "‘A Voice from across the Sea’: Communitarianism at the Limits of Romanticism." In At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, Feminist, and Materialist Criticism, edited by Mary A. Favret and Nicola J. Watson, pp. 83-100. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (Evaluates Shelley's The Mask of Anarchy within the context of a Romantic theory of identity.)
  • Jones, Steven E. "Apostasy and Exhortation: Shelley's Satirical Fragments in the Huntington Notebooks." In The Huntington Library Quarterly 53, No. 1 (Winter 1990): 41-66. (Surveys Shelley's experimentation with a variety of satirical modes.)
  • Jones, Steven E. Shelley's Satire: Violence, Exhortation, and Authority. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994, 215 p. (Full-length study of Shelley as a satirist particularly concerned with “interactions between personal agency and social determination.”)
  • Kahan, Claudine T. "Shelley's ‘Hymn to Mercury’: Poetic Praxis and the Creation of Value." In Studies in Romanticism 31, No. 2 (Summer 1992): 147-69. (Considers Shelley's thoughts on poetic genius and utility as represented in his translation of the Homeric Hymn to Mercury.)
  • King-Hele, Desmond. Shelley: His Thought and Work. 3d. ed. London: Macmillan Press, 1984, 383 p. (An appreciative general introduction to Shelley's poetry with emphasis on his interest in the sciences. King-Hele includes an annotated bibliography of books on Shelley published since 1970.)
  • Kipperman, Mark. "Absorbing a Revolution: Shelley Becomes a Romantic, 1889-1903." In Nineteenth-Century Literature 47, No. 2 (September 1992): 187-211. (Follows developments in the late nineteenth century of scholarly regard for Shelley as a Romantic poet and theorist.)
  • Kipperman, Mark. "History and Ideality: The Politics of Shelley's Hellas." In Studies in Romanticism 30, No. 2 (Summer 1991): 147-64. (Elucidates the utopian propaganda of Shelley's Hellas.)
  • Kurtz, Benjamin P. The Pursuit of Death: A Study of Shelley's Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1933, 339 p. (A controversial study of Shelley's preoccupation with death.)
  • Lee, Monika H. "‘Nature's Silent Eloquence’: Disembodied Organic Language in Shelley's Queen Mab." In Nineteenth-Century Literature 48, No. 2 (September 1993): 169-93. (Argues that Queen Mab demonstrates Shelley's use of imaginative and lyrical language for empirical purposes.)
  • McNiece, Gerald. Shelley and the Revolutionary Idea. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969, 303 p. (A close examination of Shelley's revolutionary ideology in the context of the French Revolution and the philosophies of British radicals.)
  • Nair, Sharada. "Poetic Constitutions of History: The Case of Shelley." In Textual Practice 8, No. 3 (Winter 1994): 449-66. (Follows Shelley's evocation of the forces of history in his works.)
  • Norman, Sylva. Flight of the Skylark: The Development of Shelley's Reputation. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954, 304 p. (Chronicles the development of Shelley's posthumous reputation, emphasizing the role his family and friends played in shaping it.)
  • O’Neill, Michael. "Fictions, Visionary Rhyme and Human Interest: A Reading of Shelley's ‘The Witch of Atlas’." In Keats-Shelley Review, No. 2 (1987): 105-33. (Explores the poetic form and broad range of imagination displayed in “The Witch of Atlas.”)
  • Paley, Morton D. "Apocapolitics: Allusion and Structure in Shelley's Mask of Anarchy." In The Huntington Library Quarterly 54, No. 2 (Spring 1991): 91-109. (Observes in The Mask of Anarchy Shelley's mutable view of “the relationship between apocalypse and millenium.”)
  • Parker, Ingrid J. "Shelley's Descriptive Landscape Imagery: The Principle of Cosmic Harmony." In English Language Notes XXVIII, No. 4 (June 1991): 23-41. (Highlights the transcendent and synesthetic qualities of Shelley's natural imagery.)
  • Peacock, Thomas Love. Peacock's Memoirs of Shelley, with Shelley's Letters to Peacock, edited by H. F. B. Brett-Smith. London: Henry Frowde, 1909, 219 p. (An early memoir of Shelley first published between 1858 and 1962. Peacock sought to rectify misrepresentations in accounts by Hogg, Trelawny, and others.)
  • Pulos, C. E. The Deep Truth: A Study of Shelley's Scepticism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1954, 124 p. (A respected survey of Shelley's intellectual development.)
  • Purinton, Marjean D. "Percy Shelley's Cenci and Prometheus Unbound and the Ideology of Moral Melioration." In Romantic Ideology Unmasked: The Mentally Constructed Tyrannies in Dramas of William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Joanna Baillie, pp. 95-124. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1994. (Concentrates on Shelley's challenge to oppressive ideological systems in The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound.)
  • Reiman, Donald H. Percy Bysshe Shelley. Twayne's English Authors Series, edited by Sylvia E. Bowman, vol. 81. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1969, 188 p. (A general introduction to Shelley's life and works.)
  • Reiman, Donald H. Shelley's "The Triumph of Life": A Critical Study Based on a Text Newly Edited from the Bodleian Manuscript. Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, vol. 55. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965, 272 p. (A detailed examination of the text and imagery of Shelley's last work.)
  • Richardson, Donna. "The Hamartia of Imagination in Shelley's Cenci." In Keats-Shelley Journal XLIV (1995): 216-39. (Argues that Beatrice, rather than being solely a sympathetic victim, shares some responsibility for her tragedy in The Cenci.)
  • Ridenour, George M., ed. Shelley: A Collection of Critical Essays. Twentieth Century Views, edited by Maynard Mack. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965, 182 p. (Reprints essays by such distinguished critics as Humphry House, Carlos Baker, Earl R. Wasserman, G. M. Matthews, G. Wilson Knight, and Harold Bloom.)
  • Rieger, James. The Mutiny Within: The Heresies of Percy Bysshe Shelley. New York: George Braziller, 1967, 283 p. (Discusses Shelley's deviations from the accepted theological doctrines and sociopolitical thought of his time.)
  • Rogers, Neville. Shelley at Work: A Critical Inquiry. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956, 356 p. (A study of Shelley's thought and work based on an examination of his rough-draft notebooks.)
  • Schulze, Earl J. Shelley's Theory of Poetry: A Reappraisal. Studies in English Literature, Vol XIII. The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1966, 237 p. (Considered an important study of Shelley's poetics. Schulze's central concern is Shelley's exalted conception of poetry.)
  • Scrivener, Michael Henry. Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982, 354 p. (An assessment of Shelley's philosophical and political thought.)
  • Strand, Ginger and Sarah Zimmerman. "Finding an Audience: Beatrice Cenci, Percy Shelley, and the Stage." In European Romantic Review 6, No. 2 (Winter 1996): 246-68. (Comments on Shelley's reluctance to elicit an audience's full sympathy for Beatrice in The Cenci.)
  • Trelawny, E. J. Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron. London: Edward Moxon, 1958, 304 p. (A lively narrative of Trelawny's friendship with the poets in Italy.)
  • Ulmer, William A. "Adonais and the Death of Poetry." In Studies in Romanticism 32, No. 3 (Fall 1993): 425-51. (Illuminates the apocalyptic vision of Shelley's Adonais and its implications regarding Shelley's view of “the death of representation.”)
  • Wasserman, Earl R. Shelley: A Critical Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971, 507 p. (A highly respected study of Shelley's major poems.)
  • Weaver, Bennett. Toward the Understanding of Shelley. 1932. Reprint. New York: Octagon Books, 1966, 258 p. (Investigates Shelley's familiarity with the Bible and analyzes his works in the context of biblical prophetic tradition.)
  • Weisman, Karen A. "Shelley's Triumph of Life over Fiction." In Philological Quarterly 71, No. 3 (Summer 1992): 337-60. (Contends that Shelley's unfinished poem The Triumph of Life ultimately points to absences and the limitations of human apprehension.)
  • Wheatley, Kim. Shelley and His Readers: Beyond Paranoid Politics. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999, 278 p. (Studies the immediate public and critical reception of Shelley's Queen Mab, Prometheus Unbound, and Adonais.)
  • White, Newman Ivey. Shelley. 2 vols. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940. (Considered the definitive biography.)
  • Wright, John W. Shelley's Myth of Metaphor. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1970, 79 p. (Discusses the modernity of Shelley's poetics.)
  • Young, Art. Shelley and Nonviolence. Studies in English Literature, vol. CIII. The Hague: Mouton, 1975, 172 p. (Attempts to define Shelley's philosophy of nonviolence through a study of his writings.)

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Shelley, Percy Bysshe (Poetry Criticism)

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