SHELLEY'S EYE: Travel Writing and Aesthetic Vision
Benjamin Colbert
Ashgate Publishing Ltd
April 2005
The Nineteenth Century Series
ISBN 0-7546-0485-3 (hardcover)
272 pages; 5 b&w illus.; $89.95/£45.00
Percy Bysshe Shelley joined the deluge of sightseers that poured onto
the Continent after Napoleon's defeat in 1814, and over the next eight
years Shelley followed major travelling trends, visiting Switzerland in
1816 and Italy from 1818. Shelley's Eye is the first study to address
Shelley's participation in the travel culture of Post-Napoleonic Europe,
and the first to consider Shelley as an important travel writer in his
own right.
This book is informed by original research on a wide range of period
travel writings, including Mary Shelley and Shelley's neglected
collaboration, History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817), in which 'Mont
Blanc' first appeared. Fully responsive to the culture of travel,
Shelley's travel prose and poetry form fascinating conversations with
major Romantic travellers like Byron, Wollstonecraft, and Wordsworth, as
well as lesser-known but widely read travel writers of the day,
including Morris Birkbeck, Charlotte Eaton, and John Chetwode Eustace.
In this provocative study, Benjamin Colbert demonstrates how the Grand
Tour remains a vital cultural metaphor for Shelley and his
contemporaries, under pressure from mass travel and popular culture.
Shelley's travel prose and 'visionary' poetry explore motives of
perception underlying travel discourse and posit an authentic 'aesthetic
vision' that reconfigures social, historical, and political meanings of
'sights' from the perspective of an ideal tourist-observer.
Shelley’s Eye offers a new perspective on Shelley’s intellectual
history. It is also a timely and important contribution to recent
interdisciplinary scholarship that aims to re-evaluate Romantic idealism
in the context of physical, experiential, and material cultural practices.
The link below leads straight to the Shelley's Eye page on the Ashgate
website:
https://www.ashgate.com/shopping/title.asp?key1=&key2=&orig=results&isbn=0%207546%200485%203
*********************************************************
British Association for Romantic Studies
http://www.bars.ac.uk
To advertise Romantic literature conferences, publications, jobs, or
other events that the BARS members would be interested in, please
contact Sharon Ruston <[log in to unmask]>
Also use this address to register any change in your e-mail address,
or to be removed from the list.
Messages are held in archives, along with other information about the
Mailbase at: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/bars.html
*********************************************************
|