“A bright erroneous dream”: The Shelley Memorial and the body of the poet
This article argues that Edward Onslow Ford’s Shelley Memorial at University College Oxford (inaugurated in 1893) played an important role in refashioning Percy Bysshe Shelley’s corpus at the turn of the century, particularly by enabling political and homoerotic readings of his works, and contribute...
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| Format: | Journal article |
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Taylor and Francis
2018
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| Summary: | This article argues that Edward Onslow Ford’s Shelley Memorial at University College Oxford (inaugurated in 1893) played an important role in refashioning Percy Bysshe Shelley’s corpus at the turn of the century, particularly by enabling political and homoerotic readings of his works, and contributed to a distinctive fin-de-siècle reception of the Romantic poet. The display and architectural setting of the Shelley Memorial activate Shelley’s poetic Platonism by playing with the metamorphic possibilities of light and shadow. The sculptural medium thus generates new ways of reading Shelley just as it illuminates the aesthetics and politics of Victorian classicism and nineteenth-century attitudes to the cultural significance of the male poetic body. |
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