The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley takes stock of current developments in the study of a major Romantic poet and prose-writer, and seeks to advance Shelley studies in new directions. It consists of forty-two chapters written by an international cast of established and emerging scholar-critics. This Handbook is divided into five thematic sections: Biography and Relationships; Prose; Poetry; Cultures, Traditions, Influences; and Afterlives. The first section reappraises Shelley’s life and relationships, including those with his publishers through whom he sought to reach an audience for the ’Ashes and sparks’ of his thought, and with women, creative collaborators as well as muse-figures. The second section gives his under-investigated prose works detailed attention, bringing multiple perspectives to bear on his conceptual positions, and demonstrating the range of his achievement in prose works from novels to political and poetic treatises. The third section explores Shelley’s creativity and gift as a poet, emphasizing his capacity to excel in many different poetic genres. The fourth section looks at Shelley’s response to past and present literary cultures, both English and international, and at his immersion in science, music, theatre, the visual arts, and travel. The fifth section concludes the volume by analysing Shelley’s literary and cultural afterlife, from his influence on Victorians and Moderns, to his status as the exemplary poet for Deconstruction. Packed with stimulating insights and readings, The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley brings out the relevance to Shelley’s own work of his dictum that ’All high poetry is infinite’ .

Michael O’Neill, Professor of English, Durham University, Anthony Howe, Reader and Director of Graduate Research, School of English, Birmingham City University, Madeleine Callaghan, Lecturer in Romantic Literature, University of Sheffield

Michael O’Neill is a well-known critic of poetry, and has written monographs on Shelley (1989), Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem (1997), and The All-Sustaining Air (2007). He edited The Cambridge History of English Poetry (2010), and has also co-edited (with Madeleine Callaghan) Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry: Hardy to Mahon (2011), and a much-praised anthology of Romantic poetry with detailed comments on poetic form (2007), both for Blackwell. He has published two collections of poems, and received a Cholmondeley Award for Poets in 1990. His work has been much praised by many critics for its sensitivity to poetry and its ability to find an answerable language for poetic effects.

Anthony Howe has taught at both Cambridge and Oxford Universities and is currently Reader and Director of Graduate Research at Birmingham City University. He has published essays on Byron and Shelley and is currently finishing a monograph entitled Byron and the Forms of Thought for Liverpool University Press.

Madeleine Callaghan is Lecturer in Romantic Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her research specialty is the poetry of Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Yeats, and she also has research interests in post-war British and Irish poetry. She is the co-editor (with Michael O’Neill) of TwentiethCentury British and Irish Poetry: Hardy to Mahon.