Merrilees Roberts reviews Percy Shelley for Our Times

Percy Shelley for Our Times. Ed. Omar F. Miranda and Kate Singer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2024. 290 pp.

11 October 2024

This provocative and rich collection of essays casts Percy Bysshe Shelley as an “arch poet of relation,” where relationality is understood both metaphysically and socially as a series of reflective “interconnections and relationships among peoples, times, places, and fields of knowledge” (p. 3). Shelley’s thinking on “conjoined and collapsed notions of time” provides impetus for the contributors to reveal “intergenerational and intercultural caretaking, genealogies of intellectual influence, political expressions of artful mediation, and global networks of intimacy and communication” (p. 3). Foci include nonbinary sexuality, race relations, Shelley’s silence on slavery, disability theory, and relations with the nonhuman. Taking its cue from the lines from Prometheus Unbound describing “ten thousand orbs involving and involved,”[1] Singer and Miranda put forth the argument that to be involved with historical, though transitory and actively “transiting” concerns, is not to be lost to immersion within them but to be actively engaged with forming ever-new connections with disparate entities (p. 9). This is not a hagiographic “strategic presentism” but a prompt for us to think anew about method: about how texts, histories, and critical stances might sit alongside or within one another, stepping beyond subjecting literature to unilateral readings per se (p. 2). Nikki Hessell’s “Shelley, Treaty-Making, and Indigenous Poetry,” with which the volume opens, is a case in point, reading Shelley’s poems intertextually through indigenous treaty negotiations that engage with the “moral and legal failings of the British state that Shelley’s poems diagnose as part of a global political culture” (pp. 23–24).

In pushing theoretical reflection upon the way both we and literary texts are entangled within what this collection calls the “orbish” and revisionary movements of history further than textually focused readings often can, these essays explore how we might read-with the historical contexts that matter to us, and that mattered to Shelley’s time (p. 7). The modes of reading-with undertaken in this collection trouble neat distinctions between critical readings that work with or against the grain, as literary texts are themselves taken to be non-hierarchical and not easily orientable: “iterative practice[s] of accumulating and intersecting flows of time” rather than “dialectical schemes” (p. 6). Readings of this collection as a deliberate exhumation of a problematic Shelley, or simply a Shelley for 2024, would then be misemphases, as the collection proposes an ongoing metaphysics of “iconoclastically transiting fields” rather than a “critical agon” (where “fields” are both something like forces or feelings and academic disciplines): a generative phrase that stimulates reflection on how apparently iconoclastic thinking can seek to revolve and reform as much as raze that from which it departs (p. 9). This is encapsulated in Omar F. Miranda’s essay “Percy Shelley’s Sad Exile,” which takes Prometheus Unbound’s depiction of exile as an ecstatic continuum of collaborative self-differentiation that can conceive of both “independent and interdependent” efforts at social amelioration “beyond the traumas of displacement” (p. 177).

More explicit discussion of the theories of time and history that are being reworked and a wrangling with the legacy of New Historicism would have been welcome, though it was refreshing to see Deconstruction cast as a mode of relationality. Some will find the overall approach anachronistic, but one hopes that it can nevertheless be acknowledged that Singer and Miranda’s stress on revolving temporalities is itself a Shelleyan mode: a response in kind to his own interest in poetry being “the trumpet of a prophecy”[2] (“A Defence of Poetry”), and to his curious insistence that “Hope creates / From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.”[3] An oscillation between hope and hopelessness, and the ways in which hope can be “prone to uselessness,” is the subject of two prescient essays by Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud and Joel Faflak, which bring into focus (for our time, in the shadow of the demise of the humanities) the double-edged nature of the way Shelley has been read in different quarters as both political activist and “‘ineffectual angel,’” a point with which Singer and Miranda’s introduction opens (pp. 261, 2). Overall, Percy Shelley for Our Times encourages us to consider post-poststructuralist (without being necessarily post-critical) ways of accepting that our productions will “not finish,” but rather “continue a mutual project by reading and writing, speaking and listening” that challenges us to rethink the aims and modes of literary criticism as a whole (p. 5).

[1] Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound in Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama, ed. Vida D. Scudder (Boston, 1897), l. 241, p. 106.

[2] Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind,” in Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama, l. 13, p. lviii.

[3] Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, ll. 573–74, p. 120.