Description
Shelley's Broken World is a provocative and profound reassessment of Shelley's poetic art and thought. Bysshe Inigo Coffey returns to a peculiarity of Shelley's expressive repertoire first noticed by his Victorian readers and editors: his innovatory use of pauses, which registered as irregularities in ears untuned to his innovations. But his pauses are more than a quirk; various intermittences are at the centre of Shelley's artistry and his thought.
This book aims to transform the philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic contexts in which Shelley is positioned. It offers a ground-breaking analysis of his reading, and is the first study to refer to and include images of the unpublished 'Marlow List', a record of the books Shelley left behind him on his departure for Italy in 1818. Shelley's prosody grew to articulate his sense that actuality is experienced as ruptured and fractured with gaps and limit-points. He shows us the weakness of the actual. As we approach the bicentenary of the poet's death, Shelley's Broken World provides an exciting new beginning for the study of a major Romantic poet, the history of materialism, and prosody.
About the Author
Bysshe Inigo Coffey is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and Early Career Fellow at Balliol College, University of Oxford.
Reviews
'Percy Bysshe Shelley has long been known by poetry cognoscenti as the Marmite of poets. Carlyle (whom I hate) called him "Weak in genius, weak in character (for these two always go together); a poor thin, spasmodic, hectic, shrill and pallid being" and Charles Kingsley, a founder of Muscular Christianity, compared "the increase of Shelley-reading in Britain in the 1850s to another growing female addiction, the secret sipping of eau-de-cologne". Bysshe Inigo Coffey is without doubt an admirer, who sees Shelley's poetic intelligence and sensuous experience in harmony like no other with an especially endearing "grasp upon the weakness of the actual". Through new research in the "Marlow List" Coffey meticulously places Shelley in his philosophical and scientific milieux, tracing Shelley's reading in Kant and Rousseau as well as in medicine, geophysics, astronomy, anatomy and the life sciences. This is a work of scholarly elegance as well as depth on matters of pointing and crux, of "great, last fragments", through the full range of Shelley's poetry but especially Alastor, Peter Bell the Third, and Epipsychidion.'
Regenia Gagnier, University of Exeter
'This book explores inter alia how the dissolution of the boundary between mind and matter is expressed by Shelley in his dissolution of the boundary between philosophy and poetry. In this he resembles Lucretius, one of numerous poetic, scientific, and philosophical influences on Shelley presented by Coffey with rigorous scholarship. The eloquent passion of his book leaves us with the sense that Shelley was grappling with fundamental problems, and their solutions through poetic imagination, that - even if they no longer concern us - certainly should do.'
Richard Seaford, University of Exeter
'Shelley's Broken World is a piercingly insightful and gracefully written book that both widens and sharpens our understanding of the poet's intellectual and poetic engagement with the world. Bysshe Coffey has that rare talent: an ability to combine rigorous historical research with a sensitive, finely tuned ear for poetry. In this sophisticated study, Coffey shows how the pauses, fractures, absences, and breaks in Shelley's canon are momentous. These textual spaces reflect and express the poet's thinking about politics, society, and human life in general. This book sets new standards in Shelley studies and indeed, Romantic studies.'
Corinna Wagner, University of Exeter
'Shelley was a polymath, and in Shelley's Broken World Coffey provides one of the best attempts to comprehend the range, sophistication, and meaning of the poet's mind. Coffey's mastery of Shelley's poetry and its contexts is remarkable, and, more importantly, he provides brilliant readings of how the two interact. The European literature and thought that inform poems such as Alastor and Epipsychidion are thoroughly explored, but Coffey is also adept at close readings which tease out Shelley's sense of absence and vacancy enacted by form and metre. It is refreshing that Coffey manages to take the philosophical implications for any study of materiality seriously without succumbing to jargon or theoretical wandering. Furthermore, his book is part of a tradition, and he engages on every page with Shelley's best critics and editors, while maintaining a confident and unique critical voice.'
Will Bowers, Queen Mary University of London
'This study should transform our understanding of Shelley's work. Coffey writes like an angel, and he has an ear for the detailed nuances of metre and rhythm that is rare indeed; better still, he combines this gift with a painstaking archival scholarship and a deeply learned appreciation of the intellectual milieu in which Shelley worked.'
Tim Kendall, University of Exeter
'Not only is [this] a work of remarkable scholarship, demonstrating meticulous research and close reading and containing numerous archival revelations that will transform our understanding of Shelley, it is also an intense labour of love that realises the continuing vitality of Shelley's poetry and philosophy for the activity of thinking and living. [...] It is an excellent conclusion to an excellent book. Characterized by an intensity and clarity of argument, a sensitivity for both the historical and the poetical, and perhaps above all a principled defence of the simultaneous weakness and power of thought, Shelley's Broken World brings to life anew 'the frail pauses of this simple strain' (Shelley, Alastor).Robert Scott, The Review of English Studies
'Bysshe Coffey's Shelley's Broken World is a broad-ranging study: one part old-fashioned history of ideas; one part monograph on Shelley's heretofore underappreciated practice of bringing much of his verse to life within the pauses and "limit-points" of sensory perception, cognition, and prosody. [...] Coffey's book will influence and enrich our understanding of Shelley's achievement for a long time.'Michael J. Neth, Romantic Circles
'This work is done with assurance by Coffey, in terms of Shelley's relation to contemporaneous, and earlier, science, philosophy, and poetic repertoires. [...] This convivial aspect holds in a professional and not just thematic sense, as Coffey works closely within the Shelley editorial circle. [...] The provenance of the many insights in Shelley's Broken World is impressively evidence-based. Coffey has an archival ace in the hole [...] able to pursue surprising investigations, and to shore up the grounds of several internal questions long held in Shelley Studies. At the same time, Coffey is a giftedly creative critic who can leap to his insights straight off. [...] Shelley's Broken World's greatest strengths are its professional content and its style, aligning scholarly argument to a temperament that redeems belles lettres through meticulous research.'
Eric Lindstrom, The BARS Review
'Shelleyans will find much to enjoy and think over in Shelley's Broken World. Coffey has a deep knowledge of Shelley's corpus and the history of its reception and editing, and he shares this knowledge in an engaging prose style. He writes on neglected works, recounts editors' debates about pointing, and traces obscure lines of thought weaving through the Marlow List with unpretentious delight. His close readings are thoughtful and judicious... gaps are full of possibilities.' Steve Tedeschi, Wordsworth Circle
'Coffey shows how profoundly Shelley's work engages with the philosophical, scientific, artistic, and cultural climate of the nineteenth century. Scholarly, thoughtful, and finely researched, Shelley's Broken World presents fresh and invigorating readings of Shelley's poems, employing hitherto unseen archive material. Elegantly written, this research monograph is an impressive achievement.' University English Book Prize 2022
'Beyond its adroit deployment of the Marlow List, Coffey's volume combines a light touch with finely considered context and sensitive close readings.' Thomas Coughlin and Shane Greentree, The Year's Work in English Studies
Book Information
ISBN 9781837644308
Author Bysshe Inigo Coffey
Format Paperback
Page Count 248
Imprint Liverpool University Press
Publisher Liverpool University Press
