Abstract

Shelley's last major completed poem, Hellas , has fared poorly in most estimations of the poet's work. The present study suggests that in fact this "Lyrical Drama" is a carefully structured improvisation on the themes of cognition and history that is crucial to understanding the poet's worldview in the final years of his life. ;Chapter 1 offers a critical survey of early responses to Hellas and places these readings in the context of the great divide in Shelley criticism between Platonic-idealist and empirical-reformist interpretations of the poet's art and thought. Chapter 2 develops a contrast between Hegel's and Shelley's notions of human history, arguing that whereas Hegel understands history as a closed system having reached its terminus in the German "World-Historical People" of Hegel's day, Shelley regards it in Hellas as an open-ended process lacking a determinate telos--as the province of hope and possibility. Chapter 3 amplifies this reading by contesting Jerome McGann's ideological dismissal of the poem's Preface as a "typical Philhellenist illusion." A pronounced growth in Shelley's opinion of the exemplary value of the artistic relics of bygone cultures emerges from a comparison of Hellas with the early prose fragment, The Assassins. Kant's aesthetic theory is applied to show how in Hellas Shelley has begun to reconceive history on the creative model of art. Chapter 4 explores the evolution of the Wandering Jew from his early appearance as blasphemous rebel in Queen Mab to his role in Hellas as the spokesman for a vibrant new epistemology in which Shelley improvises on the Platonic doctrine of the World-Soul, transforming Plato's intelligible sphere of being into an internally objectified domain of mind. Chapter 5 examines Shelley's Hellenism by treating it as an imaginative departure from the teachings of J. J. Winckelmann, whom Shelley read in Italy. Shelley deviates from Winckelmann's ideal of ancient Greek artefacts as prescriptive norms by viewing them as models that invite unrestrictive imitation of their most important quality: the spirit of social, political, and individual liberty. ;Two appendices refute McGann's revisionist reading of Kant and C. E. Pulos's Berkeleian interpretation of the later Shelley's ontology