Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 ‘How Bursts the Landscape on my Sight!’: Pedestrian Excursions into the Romantic Landscape
- 2 At the Intersection of Artifice and Reality
- 3 Sublime Landscapes and Ancient Traditions: Eighteenth-Century Literary Tourism in Scotland
- 4 ‘Plumb-Pudding Stone’ and the Romantic Sublime: The Landscape and Geology of the Trossachs in The Statistical Account of Scotland (1791–9)
- 5 Readers of Romantic Locality: Tourists, Loch Katrine and The Lady of the Lake
- 6 Paradox Inn: Home and Passing Through at Grasmere
- 7 ‘O all pervading Album!’: Place and Displacement in Romantic Albums and Album Poetry
- 8 Into the Woods: Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest in the Romantic Imagination
- 9 Inspiration, Toleration and Relocation in Ann Radcliffe's A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, Through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (1795)
- 10 Henry Crabb Robinson's Initiation into the ‘Mysteries of the New School’: A Romantic Journey
- 11 Italy as a Romantic Location in the Poetry of the Original English Della Cruscans
- 12 The Location of Vacancy: Pompeii and the Panorama
- 13 Italy Visited and Revisited: Wordsworth's ‘Magnificent Debt’
- 14 Hollow Skies, Hupaithric Temples and Pythagoreans: Shelley's Dim Crotonian Truths
- 15 ‘An Imaginary Line Drawn through Waste and Wilderness’: Scott's The Talisman
- 16 Exploded Convictions, Perished Certainties: The Transformational Experience of the South Seas in Georg Forster's A Voyage Round the World
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
14 - Hollow Skies, Hupaithric Temples and Pythagoreans: Shelley's Dim Crotonian Truths
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 ‘How Bursts the Landscape on my Sight!’: Pedestrian Excursions into the Romantic Landscape
- 2 At the Intersection of Artifice and Reality
- 3 Sublime Landscapes and Ancient Traditions: Eighteenth-Century Literary Tourism in Scotland
- 4 ‘Plumb-Pudding Stone’ and the Romantic Sublime: The Landscape and Geology of the Trossachs in The Statistical Account of Scotland (1791–9)
- 5 Readers of Romantic Locality: Tourists, Loch Katrine and The Lady of the Lake
- 6 Paradox Inn: Home and Passing Through at Grasmere
- 7 ‘O all pervading Album!’: Place and Displacement in Romantic Albums and Album Poetry
- 8 Into the Woods: Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest in the Romantic Imagination
- 9 Inspiration, Toleration and Relocation in Ann Radcliffe's A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, Through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (1795)
- 10 Henry Crabb Robinson's Initiation into the ‘Mysteries of the New School’: A Romantic Journey
- 11 Italy as a Romantic Location in the Poetry of the Original English Della Cruscans
- 12 The Location of Vacancy: Pompeii and the Panorama
- 13 Italy Visited and Revisited: Wordsworth's ‘Magnificent Debt’
- 14 Hollow Skies, Hupaithric Temples and Pythagoreans: Shelley's Dim Crotonian Truths
- 15 ‘An Imaginary Line Drawn through Waste and Wilderness’: Scott's The Talisman
- 16 Exploded Convictions, Perished Certainties: The Transformational Experience of the South Seas in Georg Forster's A Voyage Round the World
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Shelley's early epic Laon and Cythna, subtitled The Revolution in the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century, published in revised form as The Revolt of Islam, might at first glance seem a problematic instance for investigating the role of localities. While the earlier drafts still abound in particular place names, only few of them are found in the final version. As Shelley puts it in a letter to a prospective publisher ‘the scene is supposed to be laid in Constantinople & modern Greece, but without much attempt at minute delineation of Mahometan manners’. His poem does indeed fail to meet even basic expectations of the then popular oriental tales. The despot may be Othman but neither the seraglio nor the furnishings are described in any detail, while the most influential aide the tyrant has and the most powerful antagonist of Laon and Cythna's revolution is a Christian priest. In short: Shelley is not admitting too much local colour to his Golden City.
While the powers involved in the revolution are appropriately cosmopolitan or generalized to serve as ‘A Vision of the Nineteenth Century’ (the text becomes particular mainly when it comes to the effects of suppression on the subdued), Shelley seems to put more emphasis on localization when the focus is less on the political panorama than on his hero and heroine – or does he?
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- Information
- Romantic LocalitiesEurope Writes Place, pp. 197 - 208Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014