Post-Romantic Relations: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Emily Brontё

Wootton, Sarah

Abstract

Across a series of essays and articles published between 2007 and 2012, Michael O’Neill placed Emily Brontë in “productive commerce” with her Romantic forebears, spotlighting Percy Bysshe Shelley (2010; O’Neill 636). The argument that follows profits from O’Neill’s reading of Brontë’s post-Romantic individualism as enmeshed in and emerging from divided perspectives and doubleness of feeling. This essay also considers the possibilities that arise from and the implications of regarding Brontë as a close, if at times circumspect, co-partner of the Romantic project. How can we reconcile Brontë as a “proximate” Romantic writer who wrote in Shelley’s slipstream with O’Neill’s observation that her “post-Shelleyan vision” renders her an “unplaceable poet, who resists our categorizing endeavours” (2011; O’Neill 59)? Seen within a broader context, how might Brontë’s resurrected Shelley move the dial on debates about Romantic receptions, refocusing attention from post-Romantic corrective to creative continuation?

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: May 6, 2024
• Online Publication Date: Jun 4, 2024
• Publication Date: Jun 4, 2024
• Deposit Date: Jul 9, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 9, 2024
• Journal: The Wordsworth Circle
• Print ISSN: 0043-8006
• Electronic ISSN: 2640-7310
• Publisher: New York University
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 55
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 67-88
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/730373
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2522381