Abstract
This book investigates how Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and their circle understood the idea of “Europe.” What geographical, political, and ideological concepts did they associate with the term? Which locations, historical episodes, and opposing “others” did they use to formulate those understandings? Through new readings of important texts—notably Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, A Defence of Poetry and Hellas—I analyze how Shelley and Byron construct ideas about Europe’s culture, history, geography, and future. In addition, the book gives sustained attention to underread material, especially Percy Shelley’s Laon and Cythna and Byron’s The Age of Bronze, arguing that they are central to an understanding of the poets’work and thought. Shelley’s and Byron’s interest in Europe, I suggest, is part of an ongoing contemporary debate prompted by the political reshaping of the continent following the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. By discussing the circle’s writings in terms of contemporaneous materials (including political commentaries, travel writings, newspapers, treaties, and diplomatic correspondence), I show how this wider context illuminates, and is illuminated by, the poets’ideas of Europe.
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Notes
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See Jeffrey N. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 5
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© 2010 Paul Stock
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Stock, P. (2010). Introduction. In: The Shelley-Byron Circle and the Idea of Europe. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106307_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106307_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-38231-6
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