Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSN › Chapter
Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSN › Chapter
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TY - CHAP
T1 - Shelley, Ireland and romantic orientalism
AU - Bradley, Arthur
N1 - Publisher Copyright: © Cambridge University Press 2003 and 2009.
PY - 2003/1/1
Y1 - 2003/1/1
N2 - In Percy Bysshe Shelley's Laon and Cythna (1817), Cythna predicts the revolution she leads will spread from the eastern plains of Islam to ‘the green lands cradled in the roar /Of western waves’(v. 2263–4). If it is not clear exactly which ‘green lands’ Cythna is referring to here, a number of factors suggest that the most likely candidates are the British Isles or, to be precise, Britain and Ireland. Romantic Orientalism has historically been written and read from a European perspective. Shelley himself famously described the poem in an 1817 letter as an orientalised displacement of a European uprising. ‘It is a tale illustrative of such a Revolution’ he writes ‘as might be supposed to take place in an European nation’(SL, I, p. 563–4). Marilyn Butler, in a recent essay on Romantic Orientalism and narrative, interprets the genre as a political allegory for the turbulent situation in Britain in particular. Despite, or perhaps because of, Anglocentric readings like these, though, it is surprising that the Irish context of Shelley's Orientalism has, until recently, remained relatively unexplored. There is, after all, more than one green land cradled in the roar of western waves in Shelley's poem. This hidden context has only begun to emerge, ironically, as the study of Romantic Orientalism has shifted away from an exclusively European perspective.
AB - In Percy Bysshe Shelley's Laon and Cythna (1817), Cythna predicts the revolution she leads will spread from the eastern plains of Islam to ‘the green lands cradled in the roar /Of western waves’(v. 2263–4). If it is not clear exactly which ‘green lands’ Cythna is referring to here, a number of factors suggest that the most likely candidates are the British Isles or, to be precise, Britain and Ireland. Romantic Orientalism has historically been written and read from a European perspective. Shelley himself famously described the poem in an 1817 letter as an orientalised displacement of a European uprising. ‘It is a tale illustrative of such a Revolution’ he writes ‘as might be supposed to take place in an European nation’(SL, I, p. 563–4). Marilyn Butler, in a recent essay on Romantic Orientalism and narrative, interprets the genre as a political allegory for the turbulent situation in Britain in particular. Despite, or perhaps because of, Anglocentric readings like these, though, it is surprising that the Irish context of Shelley's Orientalism has, until recently, remained relatively unexplored. There is, after all, more than one green land cradled in the roar of western waves in Shelley's poem. This hidden context has only begun to emerge, ironically, as the study of Romantic Orientalism has shifted away from an exclusively European perspective.
U2 - 10.1017/CBO9780511484131.008
DO - 10.1017/CBO9780511484131.008
M3 - Chapter
AN - SCOPUS:60949676814
SN - 052181085x
SN - 9780521810852
SP - 117
EP - 129
BT - English Romanticism and the Celtic World
PB - Cambridge University Press
ER -