Percy Bysshe Shelley : Selected Poems and Prose

Romantic Norths : Anglo-Nordic Exchanges, 1770-1842

'Nothing in the world can equal such a scene' : Istanbul and the 'romantic' sublime

Interrogating the 'valley of wonders' : Some romantic-period debates about Chamonix-Mont Blanc

By the time that Samuel Taylor Coleridge described Chamonix as a Valley of wonders’, in the 11 September 1802 number of the Morning Post, the region was already well established as a key focal point in the European debate about the scientific, aesthetic, political and religious significance of sublime landscape.1 However, Chamonix’s prominence on the cultural map of Europe was also relatively rece

'One draft from Snowdon's ever-sacred spring' : Shelley's Welsh sublime

Shelley and the Discourse on the Sublime

'There was a time' : William Wordsworth and Jens Baggesen recollecting childhood

'The story of this place' : Dronninggaard, John Carr, and forgotten works by William Hayley and Leigh Hunt

Percy Shelley's 'Unfinished Drama' and the Problem of the Jane Williams Poems

This essay returns to the extensive scholarly debate surrounding the lyrics and fragments which Percy Bysshe Shelley composed for Jane Williams, or with her in mind, during the last six months of his life. It takes its point of departure in what it defines as “the problem of the Jane Williams poems” – the difficulty, faced by biographers, editors, and critics alike, of mapping the relationship bet

'Of which no trace remains' : Percy Shelley's other 'lyrical drama' and the inception of Hellas

Hellas, a Lyrical Drama (1822), Percy Bysshe Shelley’s response to the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence, remains one of the most neglected of his major works. Even less attention has been paid to Shelley’s series of attempts to write about the Greek cause, which he then abandoned before he began work on Hellas in the autumn of 1821. This essay seeks to redress that neglect. It examines a

'Radiant as the morning star' : a little-known Shelley fragment and its context

'Less accessible than thou or God' : where does Shelley locate Ahasuerus in Hellas

'Such sweet and bitter pain as mine' : Mary Wollstonecraft's Short Residence and Shelley's 'Lines written in the Bay of Lerici'

De Quincey's 'fearful enemy' : a possible source for the 'Malay' in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

'My purpose was humbler, but also higher' : Thomas De Quincey's 'System of the Heavens', popular science, and the sublime

'His canaille of an audience' : Thomas De Quincey and the revolution in reading

'The child of a fierce hour' : Shelley and Napoleon Bonaparte

Revolution or reaction : Shelley's 'Assassins' and the politics of Necessity

'The city disinterred' : the Shelley circle and the revolution at Naples

This essay examines Byron's and Shelley's reactions to, and involvement with, the Neapolitan Revolution of 1820–21, using them to focus a debate about conflicting constructions of history in their writing, and to question subsequently conventional accounts of their creative relationship. It concentrates on Shelley's Ode to Naples, which it identifies as in important rhetorical blow in Shelley's pu

‘On the Ice-Islands Seen Floating in the Germanic Ocean’ : Cowper's Source for the Poem