| This dissertation examines the animals (all species are identified here under the term “animal”) in selected Shelley poetry and prose published up to 1821. This eco-critical and historical focus is not on single animals, but on texts in which there is a community of animals in relation to a protagonist. In such texts, Shelley's use of a feminized character suggests the sympathetic perspective that the protagonist should take toward the landscape and animals. While the skylark may be Shelley's most famous animal, the one he cites most frequently in his poetry is not the soaring bird or majestic mammal, but the lowly worm. Animals wander through Shelley's letters, poems, fragments, essays, and notes—in metaphor, simile, myth, image, symbol, and even menu.; Shelley uses animals to dramatize humankind's capacity for love and sympathy or for violence and hatred. These non-human species—eagles, vultures, snakes, nightingales, bees, worms, toads, alligators, fish, bats, gnats, antelope, deer, hounds, tigers, leopards, pigs, kingfishers, swans, lizards, wolves, doves, dragonflies, skylarks, goats, and horses—implement his fundamental ideas about nature and the human mind. They symbolize Shelley's continuous preoccupation: human perception and its ability to demarcate the boundary of where the mind begins; where the natural world within the mind begins; what constitutes the phenomenal world according to human perception; and what, if anything, lies beyond the perception of the five senses. Animals in his works maintain the conceptual space between the individual and the Other, the human and the non-human, the phenomenon and the symbol.; Particular works examined include: A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813), On the Vegetable System of Diet (1814–1815), Queen Mab (1813), The Revolt of Islam (1817), Alastor (1816), “Mont Blanc” (1816), “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (1816), “The Sensitive-Plant” (1820), and Prometheus Unbound (1820). |
