“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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Main Authors: Calè, L, Evangelista, S
Format: Journal article
Published: Taylor and Francis 2018
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author Calè, L
Evangelista, S
author_facet Calè, L
Evangelista, S
author_sort Calè, L
collection OXFORD
description 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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spelling oxford-uuid:707bb16a-f4e2-416e-91b5-08fef32228772022-03-26T19:37:32Z“A bright erroneous dream”: The Shelley Memorial and the body of the poetJournal articlehttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_dcae04bcuuid:707bb16a-f4e2-416e-91b5-08fef3222877Symplectic Elements at OxfordTaylor and Francis2018Calè, LEvangelista, SThis 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.
spellingShingle Calè, L
Evangelista, S
“A bright erroneous dream”: The Shelley Memorial and the body of the poet
title “A bright erroneous dream”: The Shelley Memorial and the body of the poet
title_full “A bright erroneous dream”: The Shelley Memorial and the body of the poet
title_fullStr “A bright erroneous dream”: The Shelley Memorial and the body of the poet
title_full_unstemmed “A bright erroneous dream”: The Shelley Memorial and the body of the poet
title_short “A bright erroneous dream”: The Shelley Memorial and the body of the poet
title_sort a bright erroneous dream the shelley memorial and the body of the poet
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