Freedom from the Stranglehold of Time: Shelley’s Visionary Conception in Queen Mab

摘要

Notwithstanding ground-breaking studies ofQueen Mab, the visionary scope of the workremains largely neglected. The present essaysets out to explore the vision and to show howthe concern with Time is integral to it, and notjust a framing device for Mab’s overview ofpast, present and future that forms the greatersubstance of the whole work. The poemenvisions the possibility of overcoming time’sdominion or at least of coming to terms with it.The reach of the poem encompasses andextends beyond history, the repository ofmemory and recorded time, thus placing theattack on society within a visionaryconceptualization that has no clear boundariesat all, and necessarily so. Shelley’s intent is toopen up discourse, to saturate his work withthinking that, from the broadest possibleimaginary perspective and given his ownpersonal stamp, disrupts time-boundpresuppositions that confine human liveswithin the narrow limits that imprisonthem.