The Revolt of Islam


Book Description

The Revolt of Islam (1818) is a poem in twelve cantos composed by Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1817. The poem was originally published under the title Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century by Charles and James Ollier in December 1817. Shelley composed the work in the vicinity of Bisham Wood, near Great Marlow in Buckinghamshire, northwest of London, from April to September. The plot centres on two characters named Laon and Cythna who initiate a revolution against the despotic ruler of the fictional state of Argolis, modelled on the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Despite its title, the poem has nothing to do with Islam in particular, though the general subject of religion is addressed. The work is a symbolic parable on liberation and revolutionary idealism following the disillusionment of the French Revolution.




Laon and Cythna


Book Description

Laon and Cythna is one of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s most celebrated, and most controversial, literary works. At once philosophical treatise and love story, it follows the adventures of a pair of siblings who lead a political uprising based on socialist, feminist, and ecological ideals, only to be executed for treason. In its own time Shelley’s poem was condemned by some for promoting sedition, atheism, promiscuity, and incest, while others praised its beauty and radical vision. Although it inspired a generation of writers and activists, today Laon and Cythna is hardly read except by scholars. This edition seeks to correct that oversight and to introduce new audiences to this important and powerful text. Historical appendices provide context for Shelley’s political and philosophical ideas, contemporary feminism, and the treatment of Asia and the Middle East in Romantic literature.







Shelley and the Romantic Imagination


Book Description

"Frosch offers a fuller psychoanalytic account of Shelley's poetry than previously available, discussing both oedipal and pre-oedipal conflict, the positive and negative attitudes toward both the father and the mother, and the subtle workings, defensive and creative, of the ego."--Jacket.




Laon and Cythna, Or the Revolution of the Golden City


Book Description

Excerpt from Laon and Cythna, or the Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century; In the Stanza of Spenser Liberty and justice, that faith and hope in something good, which neither violence nor misrepresentation nor prejudice can ever totally extinguish among mankind. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.




Poet Lore


Book Description




The Other Empire


Book Description

This book contributes to the body of postcolonial scholarship that explores the growth of imperial culture in the Romantic and early Victorian periods by focusing on the literary uses of the figure of the Turk and the Ottoman Empire. Filiz Turham analyzes Turkish Tales, novels, and travelogues from c. 1789-1846 to expose the three primary ways in which the Ottoman Other served as a strong counterimage of empire for both liberal and conservative writers. Through readings of such authors as Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley and Elizabeth Craven the authors identifies the Ottoman Empire as a particularly flexible trope that could be presented as noth familiar or foreign, Same or Other in a way that reflected back onto England its own vexed attitude toward its imperial success.




Romance and Revolution


Book Description

Relates the revival of literary romance to the French Revolution's imaginative impact on English Romanticism.




Romantic and Victorian Long Poems


Book Description

First published in 1999, this is a guide which provides easy access to a fairly complete range of the long poetry written in the Romantic and Victorian periods: epics, narrative poems, verse-novels and other work of over a certain length. The format provides title, author, length of work and prosodic description. Texts are then summarized according to the internal divisions. Each poem is accompanied by an objective summary and the poems as a whole are preceded by an introduction which advances a particular argument as to why the nineteenth century was so fascinated with the length that was the ultimate aesthetic rationale for the long poem.