In this course we will investigate Shelley's influences with special attention to the contexts of Greek antiquity and the Enlightenment. Percy Shelley is a poet renowned for his mythological vision. Yet his thought is compatible in many significant ways with the more properly systematic and even scientific reasoning that evolved in the Eighteenth Century. In as much as we may regard Romanticism in its cultivation of mythological and aesthetic domains of consciousness as a sensibility opposed to the sensibility of the Enlightenment, how is it that Shelley's writing has so much in common with his Enlightenment forebears, not the least of whom are his Parents-in-laws, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft? How, paradoxically, does Shelley combine the passions proper to Greek tragedy and the altered states of the lyric with the systematic division of consciousness and knowledge into categories and disciplines? Can we understand Shelley's cultivation of the aesthetic as a medium that permits the synthesis of these apparently contrary sensibilities of myth making and Enlightenment reason?

To establish Shelley's syncretism, his omnivorous mixing of every mythology he encountered as well as his invocation of animism and the mythological outlook, we'll begin with "Ode to the West Wind." We will move from this work to establish the depth of his Greek influences with a reading of his drama, The Cenci and proceed to interpret it according to Sophocles' Antigone and Oedipus at Colonus. This comprehensive effort of interpretation will be accompanied by a reading of Aristotle's treatise on tragedy, The Poetics and Shelley's "A Defense of Poetry." We shall also investigate connections between the Sophoclean and Shelleyan mythological vision in addition to the more specifically dramatic affinities. We will follow this with a reading of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound and Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound and Eumenides in order to detail the ways in which Shelley's version of the Prometheus myth is actually a rewriting of Aeschylus' Oresteia. This examination of Shelley's overt deployment of his mythological vision will be accompanied by a reading of the Theogony , an account of creation by the archaic mythographer, Hesiod. Next, we'll read Plato's Symposium, a work that Shelley translated and consider the influence of Plato on Shelley's thought.
 

In this section of the course, we'll consider how Shelley's vision falls within the moral scope of Enlightenment system builders with specific reference to Godwin, Wollstonecraft and (accessible passages from) Kant. Thinkers such as these deal in schemes of universal equity, the rights of subjects, tolerance and the employment of reason against tyranny, superstition and undue privilege. As a disciple of Godwin, Shelley is definitely in this tradition. With this in mind, we'll look to passages from Godwin and Wollstonecraft's treatises on human rights and to Kant's Groundwork for a more general sense of the properties of moral reasoning. We will reconsider the Shelleyan dramas that we've already read in light of these Enlightenment writers, and, in more specifically literary terms, we compare The Cenci to Wollstonecraft's Maria. We will extend our discussion of Shelley's social and political thought with a discussion of "Masque of Anarchy" and some of his shorter lyrics and sonnets.
 

Greek and Latin Works in Translation.

Hesiod: Theogony.
Aeschylus: Eumenides, Prometheus Bound.
Sophocles: Antigone, Oedipus at Colonus.
Plato: The Symposium.
Aristotle: The Poetics.

Selections of Archaic Lyric, Diogenes Laertius and Lucretius in reader.
 
 

Modern Works

P. Shelley: Shelley: Selected Works
Burke: A Philosophical Enquiry.
Kant: Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals
Blake: "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell."
Wollstonecraft: Maria
M. Shelley: Frankenstein.

Selections of Eighteenth Century writings on ethics and aesthetics in course reader.