Disorienting ‘Shapes’ in Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam

What is it about?

This essay examines Percy Bysshe Shelley’s longest work, "The Revolt of Islam." It compares a shared poetic strain in Shelley and his Orientalist antecedent, William Jones, whose 1772 volume of Poems gives authority to The Revolt’s own expressive poetics. Through Jones’s structuring tenets of expression over imitation, The Revolt’s metonymic use of ‘shapes’ comes to the fore as an aesthetic paradigm. This paradigm integrates universal precarity and cultural difference, generating the disoriented subjectivities that become a larger form in Shelley’s later works and underscoring the continual significance of his aesthetics and geopolitics.

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Why is it important?

Adela Pinch, Karen Swann and others have written on P.B.Shelley’s preponderance of shape idioms, with no clear consensus on his defining attributes of shape other than its association with light. This essay focuses on shapes as a metonym for cultural and embodied difference. Pinch specifically correlates Shelley’s ‘shapes’ with objects of love for Victorian readers, arguing that these readers ‘focused on the relation of shape to light, and the relation of abstraction to affection. Victorian readers were as fascinated and perplexed by the ‘shape all light’ in The Triumph of Life (a poem they loved, often going into ecstasies over Shelley’s use of terza rima) as have been contemporary critics, but they also honed in on the presence of shapes of light throughout his poetry’ (para. 123). Adela Pinch, “‘A Shape All Light’, in Taking Liberties with the Author: Selected Essays from the English Institute,” ed. Meredith L. McGill (Cambridge, MA: English Institute, 2013), Karen Swann, ‘Shelley’s Pod People,’ Romantic Praxis Series: Romanticism and the Insistence of the Aesthetic (2005) https://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/aesthetic/swann/swann.html (accessed 28 August 2018).

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