Ross Wilson is Professor of the History and Theory of Criticism at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on the history, theory, and practice of literary criticism and on Romantic and Victorian poetry. Recent work includes the monograph Critical Forms: Forms of Literary Criticism, 1750-2020 (Oxford University Press, 2023) and book chapters on John Clare and the sublime, the Bible in Shelley and Byron, balance and persuasion in the work of William Hazlitt, and Shelley, the human civilizations and rewilding. His edited volume Percy Shelley in Context, which we discuss below, has just been published by Cambridge University Press.
1) How did you first become interested in Shelley and his works?
Though I must have read some Shelley as an undergraduate, I didn’t really focus much on Romantic or nineteenth-century writing then, so I guess my first real engagement with Shelley came about 20 years ago, when I got interested in Romantic conceptions of ‘life’. I have a vivid memory of reading ‘Ode to the West Wind’ in my copy of the old Norton edition of Shelley’s works and being blown away by it (excuse the pun). And pretty quickly the rest of Shelley’s poetry – perhaps especially the longer poems such as Prometheus Unbound, The Witch of Atlas, and, of course, The Triumph of Life – became central to how I set about approaching this interest in ‘life’, as did, of course, Shelley’s fragmentary essay ‘On Life’. All of this coalesced into my book Shelley and the Apprehension of Life (Cambridge University Press, 2013), which was originally conceived as a project on Romanticism and the idea of ‘immortal verse’ quite generally. I’m glad I wrote the Shelley book instead for a number of reasons, not least among them the fact that I spent a lot of time with this fascinating, sometimes frustrating figure, whose interests, passions, and commitments remain, for me, so compelling.
2) How did you decide on the structure for the collection? How much was determined by the format of the ‘Literature in Context’ series, and how much by Shelley’s specificities?
Quite a lot was determined by the ‘Literature in Context’ format and some of the recent precedents in that series. I looked closely, for instance, at Clara Tuite’s volume on Byron and my colleague Sarah Haggarty’s Blake collection. Bethany Thomas at CUP – a really supportive and engaged editor, by the way – also made it helpfully clear that the series is primarily intended for a readership more or less new to the authors dealt with in the individual volumes. That meant that each chapter needed to be fairly introductory and to focus on its author’s own view of a particular topic, text, or relationship, instead of being, say, an overview of the current state of the field or synthesis of other critical authorities. In writing my own chapter, I found that a bit tricky at times – we so often think and write in dialogue with other critics and commentators (which I think is a good thing) – though it could also be liberating, enabling a somewhat brisker, more decisive style of writing. But all of that said about the format of the series, there was also a good deal of latitude within those various constraints. It was up to me and, eventually, the contributors to determine how best to present Shelley’s life and times, what the most salient intellectual, cultural, and political contexts for thinking about his work are, how to organise consideration of that work itself, and how to frame his legacy. And there’s some real experimentation in the book with the form of the short chapters as well – have a look at Alex Freer’s chapter on lyric, for example, or Maureen McLane’s closing ‘palinode’ in response to Shelley’s work and its reception.
3) How did you go about assembling your roster of contributors?
This was one of the most fun parts of organising the volume – a bit like playing fantasy football league but with experts on Shelley instead of left-backs and centre-forwards. I began with a list of people whose work on Shelley I felt I’d learnt a lot from over the years or, especially in the case of younger colleagues, whose work I’d recently found suggestive and intriguing. But I always knew I needed a team to cover quite a lot of ground as well – some of it ground that was, I should confess, less well-known to me than it might have been. And then the readers for CUP were also very helpful, suggesting potential contributors for certain chapters and even a bit of rejigging of my suggested contributors so that they were assigned to other chapters than the ones I’d initially had in mind for them. I ended up with a team of 40 contributors from seven different countries. It’s fair to say that no-one could assume organising that number of people was going to be easy – but actually, thanks to the professionalism and kindness of all of the contributors, it was. Everything I received was more or less the right length straight away and pretty much on time – and of really high quality. I can honestly say it’d be a pleasure to work with every one of the contributors to the volume again.
4) Looking across the volume, what are the most exciting trends you’d pick out in current work on Shelley?
I think the first thing to say in response to this question is that I’ve learnt such a lot from editing this volume. I must have been approached by CUP to edit the volume because I’m supposed to be an expert on Shelley, but I quickly realised how much about his life and career I still had to learn, as well as how many ways there are and have been for thinking about his work. I’m a bit reluctant to pick out particular trends in work on Shelley on the basis of the volume because one of the things I really value about it is that it brings together a whole range of different kinds of work – really informative chapters on Shelley’s life, relationships, legacy, and reception; attempts to bring Shelley into dialogue with a range of often unexpected writers and artists; theoretically- and critically-informed discussions of his experiments in a wide array of poetic (and prose) genres. But if I have to, well, I was struck in particular by the breadth and variousness of what we might think of as Shelley’s posthumous career. This includes his reception by later poets and writers around the world (including some of the most innovative poets writing today), as well as in television, film, and music, but also the rather vexed history of the publication of his works – something, happily, we can now look back on with the completion of the Longman edition of his works and the steady progress of the Johns Hopkins edition as well.
5) What new projects are you currently working on?
I published a monograph in September 2023 – Critical Forms: Forms of Critical Writing, 1750–2020 (there isn’t much Shelley in it, I’m afraid, though there’s quite a bit of Keats, Wordsworth, and other Romantic writers) – and have, of course, just seen Percy Shelley in Context through the press, so I’m somewhat in the aftermath of a couple of big projects. I am working on a handful of essay-length things – a piece on Edgar Allan Poe I’ve given as a paper a few times, something on Walter Benjamin’s literary criticism for an edited collection – and have a couple of editorial projects of my own in the offing. Partly coming out of my project on the history of criticism, I’m getting interested in the relations between literature and liberalism – two terms, ominously, it seems very hard to define. I’m thinking about ‘literature’ as an institution, something with a certain measure of public and political investment, that might, historically, be associated with a broad political formation often categorised as ‘liberal’. Like the Critical Forms book, I see this as another transhistorical project – Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination is obviously going to be important to it, as is Amanda Anderson’s recent work – but one that will have a significant place for figures such as Shelley, Byron, Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt, all of whom were involved, of course, in a short-lived endeavour called The Liberal.