Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World ed. by Betty T. Bennet and Stuart Curran (review)

Book Reviews45 Baptiste du Bos open up new avenues: Roger de Piles by favoring color; JeanBaptiste du Bos by emphasizing the effect of painting in the single instant. Kavanagh's book includes fifty-one illustrations of paintings by Poussin, Watteau, Chardin, Boucher, Fragonard and Greuze. His critical views of their paintings are worthwhile reading in their meticulous details, as he captures a crescendo of free-flowing instantaneous glances from painted subjects to spectators and vice versa. The critic ends his demonstration with the foreclosed moment of the moralistic Greuze. A great sense of coherence emerges from Kavanagh's analysis on the writers and painters ofthe Enlightenment as he successfully presents their dynamics at work. He clearly articulates the conflict between knowledge of the universal and awareness ofthe individual. The works in literature and art on which he focuses his attention become alive with the temporality of the here and now. In this critical book, the power ofthe word and that ofthe image seem to be freed from the fixity ofthe past and the uncertainty ofthe future, which is a rare feat. This approach of the esthetics of the moment appears refreshing both on the theoretical and exemplary levels. Moreover it sheds a light on our "fin de siècle" since numerous similarities can be surmised between the Enlightenment and our present time. But avoiding the remembrance from the past and the possibilities of the future can be scary, even when reading about eighteenth-century France. This last comment does not stand as a criticism of Kavanagh's masterful approach, but can be tossed, in a casual instant, as a warning for not setting up the present moment as an ultimate "fin en soi." CLAUDINE G. FISHER Portland State University BETTY T. BENNET and STUART CURRAN, eds. Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. 310p. In 1992 the Keats-Shelley Association of America sponsored an international conference in honor ofthe 200th anniversary ofPercy Bysshe Shelley's birth. The conference resulted in this outstanding collection of 23 essays by internationally renowned scholars, who focus on Shelley as a political and social thinker rather than on the artist and his craft. The editors have arranged the essays into four sections. Section one examines Shelley's cultural and political contexts. Shelley defined the cultural role of the poet—as "unacknowledged legislator of the world"—in reaction to Enlightenment perspectives. Section two discusses Shelley's political concerns, tracing their sources in his culture and their influence on both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here some of the more important essays in the collection grapple with issues of feminism, human rights, and radical politics. Section three considers Shelley's impact on the national liberation movements of other cultures, while section four probes 46Rocky Mountain Review the continuing relevance of Shelley's ideas to contemporary society with its ecological concerns and paradigm shifts. As the preface points out, "the motive force driving Shelley scholarship has been coming from different, virtually opposite, conceptions ofhis writing and thought" (x). On the one hand, we find the libertarian Shelley dedicated to the progress of freedom; on the other, Shelley the confirmed skeptic who sees all truths as relative and thus becomes a precursor ofthe modern poststructuralists . Scholars familiar with this dichotomy will find the chapters dealing with how Shelley has been translated into different cultures and contexts refreshing. An admirable collection, some essays may strike readers as too trendy or jargon-filled. For example, P.M.S. Dawson, in distinguishing Shelley's thought from Marx, finds that "Shelley certainly fails to be green; but he does so, not by being red, but by not being red enough" (239). Similarly, Karen A. Weisman may be difficult to decode when she writes that "the being created by poetry is one within the normative quotidian being, and the poetic world as conceived in the Defence is what I have referred to above as the hyperquotidian" (228-29). A bit more background would have also helped some readers in Bouthaina Shaaban's "Shelley in the Chartists." And many may find little evidence forArkady Plotnitsky's claim that "wave and particle imagery can be traced throughout Shelley's work...