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Literature in English, British Isles

University of Richmond

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Romantic Agonies: Human Suffering And The Ethical Sublime, Terryl Givens, Anthony P. Russell Jan 1998

Romantic Agonies: Human Suffering And The Ethical Sublime, Terryl Givens, Anthony P. Russell

English Faculty Publications

This essay examines two poems depicting human anguish in order to explore a current in Romantic thought that implicitly yields some original and compelling insights regarding the problematic relationship between art and suffering. The focus is primarily on Wordsworth's narrative of Margaret's suffering in The Excursion, then more briefly on Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. In both cases Kant's ideas about the sublime provide us with a useful perspective from which to understand the issues these poems raise.


Shelley's Prometheus Unbound : A Critical Analysis And Interpretation, Emily Carol Braxton Jan 1967

Shelley's Prometheus Unbound : A Critical Analysis And Interpretation, Emily Carol Braxton

Master's Theses

As a basis for Prometheus Unbound, which he completed in 1819 and which is his masterpiece, Shelley used Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound. Shelley used the Prometheus myth to express his own ideas about present evils and his hopes for man's future as a result of his belief that man was capable of perfectibility.