This chapter explores Percy Shelley’s reception and translation history outside Europe and Anglo-America. Its assemblage of voices includes artists and critics from around the world that attest to the breadth and depth of Shelley’s readership in the two centuries since his death. The chapter advances geographically by region, highlighting in large part the varied ways that Shelley has specifically influenced authors of colour throughout the Global South.

While Percy Shelley anticipates and speaks to many important subjects of “our times,” he also developed a poetry and methodology for connecting and collaborating with peoples in other places and epochs. In this account, the editors reconsider Shelley’s often binaristic historical reception as both politically radical and childishly idealist, instead offering a version of the poet who continuously rethinks categories and relations among people and their times.

This chapter situates Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound in the sociopolitical contexts of the Romantic “age of exile.” It argues that the drama centers on what Shelley calls “sad exile,” a phrase that deliberately toggles between the archaic and traditional meanings of “sad” as both sorrowful and steadfast. In the play, sad exile registers as an ambivalent process that neither ends nor anticipates a return to a former state or place. Rather, it becomes fundamental to maintaining the renovated society’s mutually determined livelihood. As an ongoing re-visionary and recalibrating condition, this method of self-inquiry and critical distancing permits the drama’s key transformation from complicity to collaboration.

The literary romance – the medieval genre involving questing knights, courtly love, codes of chivalry and exotic, enchanted settings – rose again to high fashion during Lord Byron’s time. The form became one of the hallmarks of Romanticism, a period whose very etymology captures the cultural obsession with the glories of the Middle Ages. Several factors contributed to the revival, including interest in the power of the imagination and the desire to consolidate national literary histories during the rise of the nation-state. In general, the romance differs from the epic – the genre out of which it grew – because it prioritizes chivalric values such as honor and justice and centers on the rewards of courtly love obtained following combat in foreign lands.