Shelley among Others: The Play of the Intertext and the Idea of Language.(Book Review)

Shelley among Others: The Play of the Intertext and the Idea of Language. By STUART PETERFREUND. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2002. xiii+406 pp. 38.50 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-8018-6751-7.

Stuart Peterfreund's aim is ambitious and laudable in a critical climate which is still redolent of fragmentariness and almost compulsory patchiness: 'to produce a comprehensive study of Shelley's poetry, including most of the major poems and many of the so-called minor poems as well' (p. ix). This endeavour situates Peterfreund's book among those studies which attempt to draw together the idealistic and the politically grounded dimensions of Shelley's work, to make 'Shelley whole' so to speak, but it also acknowledges the heteroglossic nature of Shelley's thought and work. Broadly, Peterfreund attempts to discuss 'the intertextual and linguistic conceptions and practices that Shelley himself deployed in seeking and claiming for himself a place in the Western literary tradition' (p. ix). Peterfreund emphasizes the importance of philosophy, psychoanalytic criticism, and theories of language for his own analysis and for Shelley's understanding of the role of poetry in society. More specifically, Peterfreund examines what he understands 'Shelley's idea of language and its play to be, and how [he understands] this idea to inform the formal and thematic elements, as well as the social focus, of his poetry in general and of several of his major poems in particular' (p. 2). For Peterfreund, Shelley's play of language, throughout his oeuvre, centres primarily on the continuous tension between metaphor and metonymy: 'It is the drama of moving beyond historical contingency if not beyond temporality outright, the drama of fostering the reign of metaphor and forestalling the reign of metonymy, of fostering heteroglossia and forestalling the advent of a common language, that is the basis for the [sic] both the artistic and the social engagement of Shelley's poetry' (p. 24). So far so good.

This focus on the tension between metaphor and metonymy, however useful as a starting point, is unfortunately reduced to a rather ...