Shelley's Textual Seductions

Download or read book Shelley's Textual Seductions written by Samuel Lyndon Gladden and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-01-08 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2002. This book surveys how and to what effect Shelley uses erotic narratives to mask political rhetoric within his attempts to describe and bring forth utopia. Posing erotic relationships as both an exemplar of the inequities of power and a paradigm for alternative social orders that dismantle oppressive structures, it argues Shelley’s work imagines a space where the rigidity of tyranny succumbs to the liberation of ecstatic union. From the Romantics to the Aesthetes, it argues that this model contributed to a counter-tradition in British literature which situates the erotic as a trope for political discourse. This work will be of interest to students of literature.