Imageless Truths: Shelley's Poetic FictionsUniversity of Pennsylvania Press, 1994 - 227 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
Results 1-3 of 59
... attempt at confidence in the human mind , and its irrevocable propensity for metaphoric recreation of all that it ... attempting to acknowledge the fictionality of his poetic tropes of belief , begins to con- front the guilt of his ...
... attempt to fill the absence of perceptible meaning . Hence are born the myths wrought of avarice , “ arrayed in which those worms did monarchize / Who made this earth their charnel ” ( 504–5 ) . The corrupt , attempting to fill their ...
... attempt and a new failure to define completely . The passage yields a paradoxically double sense that words are inadequate and that they manage adequately to tell us this . They convince us of the ' splendour ' of their subject . The ...
Contents
To Spread a Charm Around the Spot | 10 |
The Awful Shadow of Some Unseen Power | 39 |
The Language of the Dead | 71 |
Copyright | |
4 other sections not shown