Québec Université Laval, Bibliothèque 2018

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This dissertation examines George MacDonald's preoccupation with his literary predecessor Percy Shelley. While eminently Victorian in many ways, MacDonald was equally a late Romantic, who was inspired by the Romantic poets and positioned himself as the heir to their radical tradition. While he channeled their visionary ardor, he also made it his duty to correct what he saw as their flaws. I read MacDonald through the figure of Shelley, with whom MacDonald seems to have personally identified, but to whose atheism MacDonald, a devout believer, objected. MacDonald's fascination with Shelley works its way into his fiction, which mythologizes literary history, offering fables about the transmission of the literary spirit down through the generations. Throughout his work, MacDonald resurrects Shelley in various guises, idealizing and reshaping Shelley into an image that is startlingly like MacDonald himself. This project contributes to MacDonald scholarship by offering a new approach to his work. It positions MacDonald, who is often portrayed as an ahistorical myth-maker, in an explicitly historical light, revealing him as a Victorian mythographer who was deeply invested in questions of literary criticism and historical succession. / Chapter 1 introduces MacDonald's concern with literary genealogy, and discusses how his work as a literary critic and historian idealizes Shefey. Chapter 2 examines how MacDonald's Phantastes portrays literary history as romantic quest, featuring Shelley as a heroic but fallen knight, and opening questions about literary fatherhood. Chapter 3 interprets the gothic tale "The Cruel Painter" as a myth about the transition from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, in which MacDonald rewrites the story of Shelley's involvement with Mary Godwin and her father William Godwin. Chapter 4 considers Sir Gibbie and Donal Grant, works in which MacDonald explicitly critiques Shelley, and implicitly positions himself as the savior of the English literary tradition. Chapter 5 investigates MacDonald's later works, The Flight of the Shadow and Lilith, in which Shelley---and evil itself---become more complex entities. Throughout the dissertation, particular attention is given to the issue of repeating history vs. redeeming history, a tension that is reflected in MacDonald's use of vampire imagery to portray the unredeemed past.

This thesis argues that in the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius Shelley found an insight into the role of contingency in physical and historical process which allowed him to go beyond the limitations of an intellectual inheritance divided between post-Kantian Romanticism and the sceptical revolutionary Enlightenment. This insight entails radical implications for our understanding of the political role of the literary text. Shelley conceives society in evolutionary terms, making poetry a revolutionary clinamen (or mutation) in the iterative cycles of social reproduction. Models drawn from contemporary chaos theory help us to understand how this entropic tendency to disorder can work simultaneously as a negentropic motor of social innovation. Building on the work of Michel Serres, who demonstrates that Lucretius anticipates the recent scientific interest in "determinate indeterminacy," this thesis shows that Shelley's understanding of historical process and the role of the poet in social reproduction has anticipated some of the implications of contemporary "chaos science" in ways that suggest models for the general application of this new paradigm of contemporary scientific thought to literary and political issues.

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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It is the principal purpose of this study of the early criticisms of Shelley to contrast the opinions of him in England and America and to find reasons for the widely divergent attitudes of the reviewers in the two countries.