English Language and Literature Commons^™

This essay collection takes as its starting point a 2001 volume in the Romantic Circles Praxis Series, Reading Shelley’s Interventionist Poetry, 1819-1820, in which volume-editor Michael Scrivener, employing Theodor Adorno's terminology, identifies a binary in Shelley's "interventionist" work: the "antinomy of commitment and autonomy." Asking what it means for a work of art to intervene in its immediate political context, this volume asserts the necessity of seeing through and beyond the antinomy of political commitment and artistic autonomy by rereading and reimagining the political in Shelley’s writings and his legacy. Indeed, the essays in this volume chart new political …