'The web of being': Shelley's allegories of history

Most commentators on Shelley agree with Kenneth Neill Cameron's pronouncement that the "main inspirational force in Shelley's work...is his theory of historical evolution." While Cameron's thesis is widely upheld, and a few studies on individual poems have offered significant insights into Shelley's use of history, there remain fundamental inconsistencies in Shelley's historical thought--inconsistencies and contrarieties that have not been satisfactorily explained in relation to Shelley's overall creative project and his radical political thought. Addressing the need, therefore, to reconsider the ways Shelley's texts confront and configure history, my study examines three of Shelley's major poems--Queen Mab, Laon and Cythna, and Prometheus Unbound--and argues, first, that Shelley's sense of history is foremost a historical critique, which actively engages prior readings of the past in order to expose how these versions of history cover over, what he calls in "Mont Blanc," "Large codes of fraud and woe." Second, my study argues that his historical critique is best understood through the temporal, fractured, and nonmimetic domain of allegory rather than through the totalizing, fixed unity of the symbol. Shelley writes his historical critique with images, allegories of history that are simultaneously involved in resisting and opening up the past.;Chapters One and Two assess theoretical and literary debates about history and allegory in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Chapter One outlines the specific problems of history for Shelley and shows why his texts resist traditional historical approaches, while Chapter 2 widens the area of study and examines several writers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, analyzing how they construct, read, and theorize history. Historicizing these portraits of history, my discussion focuses in particular on the Burke-Paine debate of the early 1790s and on the romance-epics of Robert Southey.;The following three chapters examine Shelley's allegories of history in each of the three poems. Chapter Three shows how Shelley, in his first major poem, allegorizes the doctrine of necessity in order to guide one of his most vivid and polemical critiques. Chapter Four studies how Shelley, in his longest and probably his most ambitious poem, reads and writes about the French Revolution, its haunting, gloomy legacy, and the contemporary social discussion of the Revolution following the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars and the restoration of monarchy in France. Finally, Chapter Five explores Shelley's most sustained and complex allegory. In part a response to his own prior thoughts about history, historical understanding, and the forms they take, Prometheus Unbound is Shelley's most concentrated effort to depict mankind's bondage to the past. The point of Shelley's allegory, however, (in contrast to many dominant readings) is not simply to deny the past, overcome it, or relinquish it, but, rather, to spatialize competing forms of history and present them simultaneously.