Notes
1 All
quotations from Shelley's poetry and M. Shelley's
introductions are from Shelley Poetical Works, ed.
Thomas Hutchinson, new ed. G. M. Matthews (Oxford
University P: London, 1970.
close window
2 For accounts
of the heart controversy, see Smith, pp. 1-2, and Hunt ii,
100-102. Hunt's obituary is reprinted in White, p.
321. For an astute account of the way the heart
becomes emblematic of and imbricated in contestations about
Shelley's cultural value, see Clarke, especially pp.
188-89.
close window
3 In
Shelley's Process, Jerrold Hogle argues that the
poem's sport—its playfully capricious relation to
plot and readerly expectations—is its mode of social
engagement: the poem works to break the hold of
mythic narrative, including those deployed to shore up a
repressive modern order (pp. 211-22). But lining and
countering this play, I would argue, is the poem's
proliferation of figures of the "not-in-play": images
that on the one hand gesture toward an art radically
incommensurable with social experience, but on the other,
verge upon the sort of fixity, glamour, and ideological
potency Hogle claims the poem as a whole critiques.
close window
4 For an
account of this period see Holmes, Chapters 24-25.
close window
5 My
discussion here is indebted to Maurice Blanchot's "Two
Versions of the Imaginary."
close window
6 See Holmes,
p.605.
close window
7 This is the
argument of Maria Torok's "The Illness of Mourning and the
Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse." My discussion here
and throughout the latter part of this essay is deeply
indebted to The Shell and the Kernal, the
collection of essays by Nicholas Abraham and Torok in which
Torok's essay appears.
close window
8 See Holmes,
pp. 518, 596.
close window
9 See, for
example, Shelley's two short poems to Mary from this time,
each entitled "To Mary Shelley" (in PW , p.
582).
close window
10 For an
especially virulent expression of this preference see
Smith, pp. 1-36. London's "Mary Shelley,
Frankenstein, and the Spectacle of Masculinity"
begins with a brief, suggestive account of the gender
dynamics implicit in various representations of the poet's
death.
close window
top of page
|
