Romance and Revolution Shelley and the Politics of a Genre [Paperback]

Relates the revival of literary romance to the French Revolution's imaginative impact on English Romanticism.The revival of romance as a literary form and the imaginative impact of the French Revolution are acknowledged influences on English Romanticism, but their relationship has rarely been addressed. Drawing on an extensive range of textual and visual sources, David Duff traces this combination in its literary and political manifestations.The revival of romance as a literary form and the imaginative impact of the French Revolution are acknowledged influences on English Romanticism, but their relationship has rarely been addressed. Drawing on an extensive range of textual and visual sources, David Duff traces this combination in its literary and political manifestations.The revival of romance as a literary form and the imaginative impact of the French Revolution are acknowledged influences on English Romanticism, but their relationship has rarely been addressed. In this innovative study of the transformations of a genre, David Duff examines the paradox whereby the unstable visionary world of romance came to provide an apt language for the representation of revolution, and how the literary form was itself politicized in the period. Drawing on an extensive range of textual and visual sources, the author traces the ambivalent ideological overtones of the chivalric revival, the polemical appropriation of the language of romance in the pamphlet war of the 1790s, and the emergence of a radical cult of chivalry among the Hunt-Shelley circle in 1815-17.Introduction; 1. The French Revolution and the politics of romance; 2. Romance and revolution in Queen Mab; 3. Sir Guyon de Shelley and friends: new light on the chivalric revival; 4. The right road to paradise: Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City; Notes; Select Bibliography; Index. ...will be savoured by those who have an interest in the literary figuration of diet and consumption in all periods as wellÓ.