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  • The Unfamiliar Shelley
  • Christopher Stokes
The Unfamiliar Shelley. Edited by Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. Pp. 369. ISBN 9780754663904. £60.00.

A collection of fifteen essays ranging across poetry, prose and drama – with a single piece focusing on ekphrasis and visuality somewhat orphaned in its own section – The Unfamiliar Shelley defines its scope forcefully and unambiguously: to shake up familiar conceptions of Shelley. Of course, what stands as unfamiliar is relative. Keen or adventurous undergraduates may well have found themselves reading Queen Mab, the fairy-tale elements of which are characterised by Christopher R. Miller as secularising a 'vestigial poetics of heaven', or Peter Bell the Third, read by Stephen C. Behrendt as encrypting both a debt to the values of early Wordsworth and a critique of the same poet's late phase. By contrast, Michael Rossington's intricate and fascinating passage through the manuscripts and drafts of the sonnet known as 'Political Greatness' relies on far less accessible textual sources, while the quintet of essays on the prose refers to material that is likely to be known to aficionados and experts only.

The editors' introduction strikes the keynote for the whole when they emphasise the neglected heterogeneity of Shelley's output. Virtually all the essays tend to make a case for revaluing their diverse subjects for what they are in themselves, rather than as merely illuminating sidelights and supplements to the more conventionally canonical (and perhaps homogeneously lyrical and idealist) Shelley. The two opening essays are exemplary in this respect. Both authors do make informative gestures towards more familiar texts: Michael Bradshaw's analysis of Shelley's fragments invokes 'The Triumph of Life' and David Duff argues that the Esdaile Notebook provides the missing link between early political verse and the watershed marked by the introspective 'Alastor'. Yet both analyses persuasively lay out the intrinsic interest and sophistication of the less well-known texts they study. In Bradshaw's hands, Shelley's notebook [End Page 187] fragments become a figure for both reading and writing as errant acts, inscribing in their very unfinishedness a break from writing to something other than language. Duff also entwines reflexivity and textuality, describing a poetics of acute self-analysis in the 1813 poems that rests most fascinatingly on a practice of self-quotation. There is a genuine sense that these poems have been unjustly overlooked, and should be re-read.

Aside from a commitment to a more diverse textual corpus, then, what do these essays have in common? Although modern scholarship is hardly in thrall to the portrait of an ineffectual angel, least of all historicist studies of Shelley's radicalism, much of the intellectual work carried out here shows that further reversing the terms of the Victorian caricature is still imperative. Two threads of this kind running throughout the collection are materiality and irony. While one would hesitate before the notion of a comic Shelley, many of the essays acknowledge and define a playful side to his work: Behrendt's piece sets off from Shelley's ambivalent relationship with the possibilities of satire, while Timothy Webb persuasively describes the 'Letter to Maria Gisbourne' as suspending more haunting, severe themes in the lighter, more polite, form of the verse-epistle. In relation to the sceptical, pragmatic and ultimately Socratic contexts of the religious and philosophical prose identified by Merle A. Williams, the attention given to the witty, acerbic 'On the Devil, and Devils' is quite in place, and the daring reversals found there anticipate the carnivalesque monde renversé noted by Timothy Morton (with revolutionary and utopian overtones) in the unusual drama Swellfoot the Tyrant.

Alongside this ironic Shelley (seen also in the more Schlegelian irony that Hugh Roberts uncovers in Shelley's prefaces), a counter-intuitive Shelley is exposed through a recurrent interest in things, materialities, flesh and so forth. Although perhaps implicit in earlier essays – the alternative transcendence, rooted in the this-worldly, imagined by Miller at the end of his reading of Queen Mab for instance – a material Shelley really steps forward with Jack Donavan's reading of Laon and Cyntha, with its repeated references to the erotic. It is a shame, in fact, that...

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