{"product_id":"shelley-s-living-artistry-letters-poems-plays-9781800856608","title":"Shelley’s Living Artistry: Letters, Poems, Plays","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis study of the poetry and drama of Percy Bysshe Shelley reads the letters and their biographical contexts to shed light on the poetry, tracing the ambiguous and shifting relationship between the poet’s art and life. For Shelley, both life and art are transfigured by their relationship with one another where the ‘poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one’ but is equally bound up with and formed by the society in which he lives and the past that he inherits. Callaghan shows that the distinctiveness of Shelley’s work comes to rest on its wrong-footing of any neat division of life and art. The dazzling intensity of Shelley’s poetry and drama lies in its refusal to separate the twain as Shelley explores and finally explodes the boundaries between what is personal and what is poetic. Arguing that the critic, like the artist, cannot ignore the conditions of the poet’s life, Callaghan reveals how Shelley’s artistry reconfigures and redraws the actual in his poetry. The book shows how Shelley’s poetic daring lies in troubling the distinction between poetry as aesthetic work hermetically sealed against life, and poetry as a record of the emotional life of the poet.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eReviews'Callaghan reads Shelley’s letters and their biographical concerns to illuminate his poetry, tracing the shifting relationship between the poet’s poetry and life. She shows that Shelley refused and exploded the boundaries between the personal and poetic by reconfiguring life events within his poetry and drama. The boundary between the poet’s life and art is a difficult one for a critic and often less useful than close textual analysis. Callaghan makes a case for the ways in which Shelley transmutes the personal into transformative poetry with Shelley’s understanding that ‘the poet man are of two different natures’ and that the ‘poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth’, where truth and eternity clash.'\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eTears in the Fence\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'Callaghan is a confident judge and writer … an able close reader, whose readings are equally adept at handling the discursive tenor of Shelley’s often philosophically involved poetry and the intricacies of his metrical and stanzaic patterning, and a diligent scholar with an impressive command of the secondary literature on Shelley’s work. She is clearly unafraid of overturning critical commonplaces that have become established in Shelley studies and, moreover, she makes a compelling case for taking the early poetry more seriously on artistic terms than it has been so far.  \u003ci\u003eShelley’s Living Artistry\u003c\/i\u003e will make study of his correspondence much more central to future accounts of his work. \u003ci\u003eShelley’s Living Artistry\u003c\/i\u003e is, then, a notable contribution to contemporary study of Shelley and, in particular, provides a useful reminder of the different genres and modes in which he wrote and the often taut relations between them.'\u003cbr\u003e Ross Wilson, \u003ci\u003eCambridge Quarterly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e‘A valuable, ranging and deeply informed contribution…to any reader sympathetic to neo-formalism, and indeed any reader sympathetic to Shelley (who can be as frustrating a poet as a brilliantly incandescent one), this study will repay attention.’\u003cbr\u003eChristopher Stokes, \u003ci\u003eThe BARS Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘In \u003ci\u003eShelley’s Living Artistry: Letters, Poems, Plays\u003c\/i\u003e, Madeleine Callaghan offers a stimulating and absorbing account of the way that Shelley self-consciously stages his artistic development in his poetry and his efforts to \"[transmute] the dross of the personal into the gold of art\"...In short, \u003ci\u003eShelley’s Living Artistry\u003c\/i\u003e makes a convincing case for reading Shelley’s poetry \"through the lens of the letters\" so as to bring into focus important aspects of his artistry and develop \"a fuller consideration of Shelley’s poetic achievement\".’\u003cbr\u003eJonathan Quayle, \u003ci\u003eEnglish: Journal of the English Association\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e‘Shelley’s art, in Callaghan’s monograph, is living. It is not something that has been created or recreated, but rather like the statue of Hermione in Shakespeare’s \u003ci\u003eThe Winter’s Tale\u003c\/i\u003e, needs only to be touched to feel its living warmth.’\u003cbr\u003e Dana Van Kooy, \u003ci\u003e European Romantic Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'This is a compellingly argued book, and it represents a serious and substantial addition to Shelley scholarship. What is particularly refreshing, however, is that Callaghan is not simply an expert scholarly reader of Shelley. She quite clearly loves his poetry and is not afraid to say so, or to reach for superlatives when only superlatives will do. It is this passion for the poetry and for understanding the depths of Shelley’s artistry that drives her close reading and animates her account of individual texts. Surely a poet as attuned to the revolutionary potential of reading as was Shelley would be pleased to have found such a reader.'\u003cbr\u003e Daisy Hay, \u003ci\u003eKeats-Shelley Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eAcknowledgements\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIntroduction: ‘A poem is the very image of life’\u003cbr\u003eStandard Abbreviations and Note on Texts\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e1. ‘Painted fancy’s unsuspected scope’: The \u003ci\u003eEsdaile Notebook\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003ePoetical Essay on the Existing State of Things\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eQueen Mab\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e2. ‘These transient meetings’: \u003ci\u003eAlastor\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eLaon and Cythna\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e3. ‘All that is majestic’: The \u003ci\u003eScrope Davies Notebook\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e4. ‘That such a man should be such a poet!’: ‘To Wordsworth’, ‘Verses Written on Receiving a Celandine in a Letter from England’, and \u003ci\u003eJulian and Maddalo\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e5. ‘In a style very different’: \u003ci\u003ePrometheus Unbound\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Cenci\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e6. ‘The sacred talisman of language’: \u003ci\u003eThe Witch of Atlas\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eA Defence of Poetry\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e7. ‘One is always in love with something or other’: \u003ci\u003eEpipsychidion\u003c\/i\u003e and the Jane Poems\u003cbr\u003e8. ‘The right road to Paradise’: \u003ci\u003eAdonais\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Triumph of Life\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eBibliography\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eIndex\u003c\/i\u003e","brand":"Liverpool University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51360138756439,"sku":"9781800856608","price":30.25,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9781800856608.jpg?v=1754126781","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/shelley-s-living-artistry-letters-poems-plays-9781800856608","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}