Kim Wheatley. Shelley and His Readers: Beyond Paranoid Politics.

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-01

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COPYRIGHT 2001 Boston University

Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999. Pp. 278. $34.95.

Shelley and His Readers offers a study of Shelley's cultural and political reception, a defense of his idealism, and some reflections on questions of critical method, especially the relationship of historicism and formalism. Kim Wheatley's "Readers" are basically Shelley's contemporary reviewers and the Shelley circle who used Adonais to shape the poet's posthumous reputation; her "Paranoid Politics," a term borrowed from historian Richard Hofstader, refers to the demonizing "crisis" rhetoric typical of early nineteenth-century periodical reviews; and her "Beyond" indicates her sense of Shelley's career as a gradual exchange of (paranoid) political entanglements for the politically distanced aestheticism of Prometheus Unbound and Adonais. The book is divided into four chapters: an Introduction concerned principally with the leading periodicals, and three clearly organized chapters devoted respectively to Queen Mab, Prometheus Unbound, and the great elegy for Keats. In considering just three texts and restricting Shelley's "Readers" to his public reviewers, Wheatley commits herself to a narrow focus. Her book nonetheless is an informed and accomplished one with much to offer...

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