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On the heels of an older generation of Romantic poets concerned with the individual’s role in creating reality, Percy Shelley defines perception as a mandatory building block for countering an external physical world that is hostile to the individual. Consequently, the question of perception, both how it is defined and how it can be influenced, plays an important role in Shelley’s works that focus on political and social change. The question of perception, as it relates to the individual and as it relates to social change, is brought to the forefront in Prometheus Unbound and his drama, The Cenci.

On the premise that examination of a poet's language can provide a valid and significant approach to the study of a work of art, this thesis proposes to make such a study of Prometheus Unbound, the major poetical work of Percy Bysshe Shelley, with specific attention to his use of color language.

Magister Artium - MA / This thesis will examine the representation of the figure of Percy Shelley in the text of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). My hypothesis is that Percy Shelley represents to Mary Shelley a figure who embodies the contrasting and more startling aspects of both the Romantic Movement and the Enlightenment era. This I will demonstrate through a close examination of the text of Frankenstein and through an exploration of the figure of Percy Shelley as he is represented in the novel. The representation of Shelley is most marked in the figures of Victor and the Creature, but is not exclusively confined to them. The thesis will attempt to show that Victor and the Creature can be read as figures for the Enlightenment and the Romantic movements respectively. As several critics have noted, these fictional protagonists also represent the divergent elements of Percy Shelley’s own divided personality, as he was both a dedicated man of science and a radical Romantic poet. He is a figure who exemplifies the contrasting notions of the archetypal Enlightenment man, while simultaneously embodying the Romantic resistance to some aspects of that zeitgeist. Lately, there has been a resurgence of interest in the novel by contemporary authors, biographers and playwrights, who have responded to it in a range of literary forms. I will pay particular attention to Peter Ackroyd’s, The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2011), which shows that the questions Frankenstein poses to the reader are still with us today. I suggest that this is one of the main impulses behind this recent resurgence of interest in Mary Shelley’s novel. In particular, my thesis will explore the idea that the question of knowledge itself, and the scientific and moral limits which may apply to it, has a renewed urgency in early 21st century literature. In Frankenstein this is a central theme and is related to the figure of the “modern Prometheus”, which was the subtitle of Frankenstein, and which points to the ambitious figure who wishes to advance his own knowledge at all costs. I will consider this point by exploring the ways in which the tensions embodied by Percy Shelley and raised by the original novel are addressed in these contemporary texts. The renewed interest in these questions suggests that they remain pressing in our time, and continue to haunt us in our current society, not unlike the Creature in the novel.

In both Prometheus Unbound and Hellas Shelley used the drama of Aeschylus as the model for composition. Accordingly, the plays' subtitle "Lyrical Drama" refers to the two major components of Aeschylean drama: the lyrics recited by the chorus and the drama of character dialogue. In taking up this specific literary genre, the poet also inherited a complex model of the socio-political system of ancient Greece, with which the dramatists had been able to explore contemporary issues. Through various means, Shelley adapted Aeschylean drama to his own language and style, using the genre's inherent capacity for social critique to examine the concerns of his time.

No substantial studies, at least to my knowledge, have yet been dedicated either to Milton's or to Shelley's extensive poetic use of the grotesque. This omission surprises me, especially given the voluminous critical attention both authors receive. Neither Milton nor Shelley's grotesquerie can be viewed as the basis of artistic method or artistic achievement as we might with, say, Rabelais, or Poe, or even Kafka. And neither Milton nor Shelley is self-consciously an artist of "the grotesque." In fact, Milton, from his seventeenth century perspective, would scarcely have regarded the term as being applicable to literary criticism at all. And as a late Romantic, Shelley defined himself rather as a poet of the imagination. Nonetheless I will show that both artists avail themselves of a grotesque aesthetic to achieve some of their most powerful and provocative poetry: we may here consider, for instance, Milton's memorable descriptions of the incongruities of Hell and the deformities of its fallen denizens in Paradise Lost, or Shelley's Gothic touches and his perplexing distortion of conventional linguistic and dramatic form in Prometheus Unbound. / Aside from general considerations of the grotesque in these texts, I will especially focus on how Milton's and Shelley's uses of the grotesque mode provide us with unique, and often fascinating vantage points from which to appreciate their respective political concerns and revolutionary interests. While I expect this critical approach will elucidate Milton and Shelley in their own separate artistic and political spheres, I am especially interested to compare and contrast the poets, to show how the quite different uses made of the grotesque in Prometheus Unbound and Paradise Lost reflect the various ways in which Shelley responds to Milton in his role as a revolutionary forefather.

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This study of Shelley's intellectual development as it is reflected in these philosophical poems is offered in the hope that knowledge of Shelley's idealism may inspire faith in the beauty which life can possess and trust in the high ideals which alone can create such beauty.