Introduction
i Shelley’s Shames
ii Shame Theories
iii Reticence
iv Affect and Romanticism
v Texts
Chapter One: Reticent Impersonations: Shelley’s Unhappy Consciousness
i The Empty Subject
ii Bad Faith
iii Shame and Ideology
iv Historicism
v The Problems of Materialism
Chapter Two: Alastor’s Mute Poets
i Shelley and Wordsworth
ii Rejecting ‘natural piety’
iii The veilèd maid and the disgrace of the alternative
iv The narrator as victim of his own constructions
Chapter Three: Shame, Silence and Historicism in The Cenci
i Beatrice’s Casuistry
ii Shame and De-humanisation
iii Shame as Self-construction
Chapter Four: Julian and Maddalo: What the ‘cold world shall not know’
i The Reticence of ‘the cold world’ and Shelley’s Critique of Symbols
ii The Maniac’s Resistance and Byron’s ‘Prometheus’
iii The Maniac’s Performance of Shame
iv Julian’s Reserve
Chapter Five: Metaphysical Sympathies
i Sympathetic Poetics in A Defence of Poetry
ii Transcending the Ego in Ode to the West Wind, Mont Blanc, Ode to Intellectual Beauty and Adonais
Chapter Six: The Jane Poems: Love, Lyric and Life
i Eroticism and the hollowness of the "Lyric I"
ii Sensory Bad faith
iii Beyond Denial
Chapter Seven: The Triumph of Life: Pleasure versus process and the shame of self-knowledge
i The Failure of Allegory
ii Rousseau as the Subject-in-Shame
iii Countering the ‘cold glare’
Conclusion
Biography
Merrilees Roberts is a teaching associate at Queen Mary, University of London, where she teaches mainly literary theory. She also completed her doctoral work on Percy Shelley at Queen Mary, examining reticence in Percy Shelley’s poetry and philosophy.
