Imageless Truths: Shelley's Poetic Fictions

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University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016 M11 11 - 248 pages

In Imageless Truths, Karen A. Weisman offers a new reading of Shelley's work in the context of the poet's changing constructions of poetic fictions. Shelley's understanding of language in general, and of the fictions and their rhetorical trope in particular, evolved throughout his career, and Weisman argues that it is in his self-consciousness over these transformations that we can find the primary motivating factor in the poet's philosophical and literary development.

Weisman discerns in Shelley an ongoing quest for a mode of fiction-making that can accommodate both the poet's belief in a "metaphysical ultimate" and his anxiety over the implications of grounding poetic fictions too firmly in the details of everyday life. If Shelley's awareness of fictionality is a major element in the poetry, it is an awareness that comes with the troubled sense of the limits of fiction. Weisman contents that it is this persistent, double-edged anxiety that distinguishes Shelley from the other English Romantics. Her point is not intended to deny the validity or the continuing relevance of the deconstructionist perspective, nor the value of its various claims for Shelley; she is simply concerned that the instability of poetic fictions was eventually perceived as a "given" by Shelley, as the beginning premise which he acknowledged and then tried to move beyond.

Imageless Truths will be of interest to students and scholars of English literature.

From inside the book

Contents

With Phantoms an Unprofitable Strife
1
1 To Spread a Charm Around the Spot
10
2 The Awful Shadow of Some Unseen Power
39
3 The Language of the Dead
71
4 Sweetest Songs That Tell of Saddest Thought
113
5 With More Than Truth Exprest
147
Notes
179
Bibliography
213
Index
225
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About the author (2016)

Karen A. Weisman is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto.

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