Shelley's radical stages: Legislating through the drama in an age of war.

摘要

My dissertation, "Shelley's Radical Stages" reassesses Percy Bysshe Shelley as a writer by placing his drama at the center of his literary work. Throughout, I argue that Shelley, along with many of his contemporaries from the eighteenth century forward, was engaged in a pragmatic political project that drew upon the popular appeal of the theatre while offering powerful reformulations of traditional dramatic modes such as tragedy, pantomime, and romance to effect political and aesthetic reforms. Essentially, Shelley challenged the sovereign power wielded by the state by means of the judiciary and the patent theatres and reformulated the drama so as to offer an alternative vision of society.;My project investigates Shelley's dramas by situating them within what we have come to see as the increasingly diverse and complex historical landscape riven by local and national riots and the ravages of war and immersed in the politics of global imperialism. Shelley draws upon this full range of cultural conflict to contest the cultural hegemony that sanctions such destruction and turns to the drama -- in many ways, the central form of the day with its government supported theaters and its pervasive influence over a public that stretched far beyond the reach of other literary genres -- in order to reflect on and speak to the issues of British and Western imperialism, slavery, and the tyranny of sovereign power as it is manifested in patriarchy, the church, and other cultural institutions. Placing the drama at the forefront of Shelley's oeuvre and examining his drama as engagements with the theatre and as reactions to national and international conflicts, I offer a theoretically inflected analysis of Shelley's response to a world deeply marked by violence. This study engages the questions raised by Georgio Agamben about sovereign power and bare life while also addressing the force of law, most adeptly discussed by Derrida, and, the kinship between domestic and state-sponsored violence that Judith Butler explores in Antigone's Claim..