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. |
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... voice was like the voice of his own soul Heard in the calm of thought ; its music long , Like woven sounds of streams and breezes , held His inmost sense suspended in its web Of many - coloured woof and shifting hues . Knowledge and ...
... voices " then appear ( in poetry , of course , speaking voices appear inaudibly ) , from the mountains , springs , air , and whirlwinds , but he complains still , " I hear a sound of voices - not the voice / Which I gave forth " ( 112 ...
... voice , and it does vomit forth its political secrets : Hark ! forth from the abyss a voice proceeds , A long low distant murmur of dread sound , Such as arises when a nation bleeds With some deep and immedicable wound ; Through storm ...
Contents
To Spread a Charm Around the Spot | 10 |
The Awful Shadow of Some Unseen Power | 39 |
The Language of the Dead | 71 |
Copyright | |
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