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Merrilees Roberts is an Independent Scholar based near London. Her work encompasses Romanticism, philosophy, psychology, poetics and literary theory, with a particular focus on Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was the subject of her doctoral thesis. She has recently published work on Prometheus Unbound in the Keats-Shelley Review, an article on Shelley’s prefaces in Romanticism, and a book chapter on shame, affect and The Cenci in Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice: A Feel for the Text (Palgrave, 2019). Her first monograph, Shelley’s Poetics of Reticence: Shelley’s Shame, which we discuss below, was published by Routledge in April 2020.

1) How did you come to realise you wanted to write a book on Shelley’s poetics of reticence?

The ideas for this project began in my MA thesis; particularly through an analysis of the ending of Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation, which has its own chapter in this book. It occurred to me that Julian withholds things from the reader in the poem’s closing lines – ‘I urged and questioned still, she told me how/ All happened – but the cold world shall not know’, because he is ashamed. Julian attempts to formulate a psychological “theory” which would explain and soften the “maniac’s” experience of unrequited love, but stalls at the moment he imagines the bathos that may follow. This prompts the question, is Julian ashamed for attempting to too simply explain the Maniac’s life or for failing to adequately explain it? My thinking went on to focus on the more abstract aspects Shelley’s use of reticence to mark such complex moments of self-doubt. My PhD thesis examined how moments of narratological omission and reserve make the reader more aware of his or her interpretative responsibility to engage with or resolve strategic gaps which indirectly figure what Shelley saw as alternative versions of ‘the poet’. Shame was never far away though, as I also argued that Shelley’s poems, by destabilising their own processes, produce dynamic intersubjective experience that work upon the reader’s sense of shame. The viva voce process made me realise that shame needed to take centre stage once more, as it became clear to me that reticence marked moments of complex, philosophical shame, where the Subject was made to confront its own failings. I came back to the idea of connecting Shelley’s desire for self-transcendence to a historicism which attempted to imagine the future, rather than the contemporary, reader who might resolve, even exculpate, the reticence of the past. And it is shame which best describes both Shelley’s self-transcendence and his historicism: shame, because it is so often objectless, is like poetry without a contemporary audience. It is only in being responsible for an unknown future audience, by making one’s present language rich enough, that we can rationalise our failings, our unfinished projects of the self, and our desire to have these exonerated.

2) You argue that shame is a crucial theme in Shelley’s poetry.  What qualities define his conception of what is shameful?

When Shelley uses the word ‘shame’ it indexes forms of psychological self-division used to justify violence or hatred towards others, as well as inert self-denigration. More importantly, what is implicitly present in his oeuvre is an overriding sense that shame is simultaneously merited by and corrective of situations where one remains trapped in one’s own existential and historical immanence. He felt ashamed when he felt he failed to communicate his own enthusiasms in a philosophically productive and democratising way. But it is in the development of a sense of shame that Shelley grounds his optimism for the future, because shame is its own recuperation. The importance of values that one has failed to advance are reaffirmed by the consequent regret the feeling of shame engenders. Hence, shame becomes the affect which accompanies Shelley’s tortuous anxieties that a poetry with high philosophical aspirations might become either not prophetic enough in its bold untimeliness, or, conversely, too involved in diagnosing its immediate historical concerns.

3) How did you select the works the main run of chapters focus on (these include Alastor, The Cenci, Julian and Maddalo, ‘A Defence of Poetry’ with Shelley’s odes and Adonais, the Jane poems and The Triumph of Life)?  Are there further Shelley poems that you’d be interested in extending the book’s lines of analysis to in further work?

My choice of texts aimed to identify moments in Shelley’s work where anxieties about the nature and status of ‘the poet’ are most acute. I wanted to pinpoint moments where feelings of being limited and trapped by historical and ideological modes were used to produce awareness of the inherently divided nature of consciousness: yearning both to consolidate and to expand the self. I wanted to show the richest examples of where reticence acts as an affective marker of and incitement to experiencing the various shames sustained by Shelley, his characters, and, most importantly, his readers. Shame is not overtly present, thematically or affectively, in all of the texts I examine. But my aim has been to show how shame, and sensitivity to shame and shamefulness, allowed Shelley to navigate interpersonal, metaphysical and political situations which blur straightforward antitheses between benevolence and aggression, self-destruction and self-respect. Though not as consistently reticent as some of his texts, I would consider extending this line of analysis to Epipsychidion. Shelleyan shame, as I define it, could be said to model a version of Platonic desire which seeks to inveigle its object (the reader) by presenting them with their own ability to be sensitive to shame; I think such a dynamic is at work in this text.

4) In introducing the book, you contend that ‘Shelley’s poet-figures yearn to transcend their historical moment but also attest to its particularity’.  For you, what aspects of Shelley’s poetry and philosophy travel best from his moment to ours?

I feel that Shelley tries to de-centre the Subject in ways which speak both to the post-structural and the more recent affective and ecological moment. A key part of my argument about Shelley’s shame is that it is activated by moments when thinking and feeling become too defined by essences, and essentialist thinking. I have used an existentialist and Marxist vocabulary to explicate this type of critique, but I think there are other critical vocabularies which use reticence as forms of resistance that could be productively used with Shelley. Connections between Adorno’s thought and Shelley’s have been noted before, and I think this is a helpful dialogue for addressing the ways that Shelley wanted to hold thinking to account whilst not insisting upon self-identicality. This also perhaps explains most clearly Shelley’s desire to value and love historical and personal particularities whilst attempting to cleanse them of ideological corruption. I think Shelley’s insistent linkage of Love and metaphysics has not until recently translated particularly well to our time. But this is changing rapidly due to the scholarly interest in ecocriticism, affect theories, the influence of Lucretius on Romantic metaphysics, and the brilliant work of Richard C. Sha, who has drawn out the close connections of mental and material conceptions of ‘force’ in Romantic literature. There is also a need to quiet or transcend the ego in Shelley’s work which, I think, resonates with the ethical (and for many, spiritual) self-awareness of our time. Shame can accompany such meditations; but this is not a linear experience that proceeds smoothly from deprecation to redemption, but an affective moment of pause and self-accounting.

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

I am currently working on an essay which reads Shelley’s lyric A Magnetic Lady to Her Patient alongside Sara Ahmed’s theory of affects which “stick” to bodies (The Cultural Politics of Emotion). I use this dialogue to explore the erotic potential of both Shelley’s lyric and Ahmed’s theory and consider how a theory of affective “stickiness” might challenge Roland Barthes’ influential notion that erotic textual pleasure is defined by inference and suggestion, rather than by the representation of “erogenous zones.” This research may develop into a larger project examining Shelley’s and Keats’ erotic poetics and the way erotic experience attempts to bridge the gap between the psyche and the senses.

Chris Murray is a Lecturer in Literary Studies at Monash University. He works on literature of the (very) long nineteenth century, with particular interests in Romanticism, Orientalism, Irish Studies, the receptions of the Classics and notions of interdisciplinarity. His first book, Tragic Coleridge (which we discussed here) was published in 2013; in 2018, he published Crippled Immortals, a work of narrative non-fiction about martial arts. His new monograph, China from the Ruins of Athens and Rome: Classics, Sinology, and Romanticism, 1793-1938, which we discuss below, was recently published by Oxford University Press.

1) How did you come to realise you wanted to write a book on the nexus between Classics, Sinology and Romanticism?

At first I thought I had set aside classical reception, a focus of my earlier research, in favour of Chinese culture, which had long been a personal interest and which led me to Singapore as a postdoc. But the Anglophone texts I read on Chinese subjects kept alluding to Graeco-Roman antiquity in a number of ways. It seemed inadequate to me that existing theories of how the West gazes at the East disregarded the fact that there is intervening matter which informs or distorts views of the other culture. There was a story to tell about how Anglophone writers constructed visions of China from imaginative materials sourced in (say) Aeschylus’ universe alongside those from the Qing Empire. Wanting to tell that story involved a series of triangulations which were enjoyable and rewarding to work on, such as that between Macartney Embassy narratives, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’, and Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; and W.B. Yeats’s ‘Lapis Lazuli’, Matthew Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna, and a Chinese stone inscribed with a poem by the Qianlong Emperor.

2) Why did Anglophone writers default to classical precedents when seeking to explain encounters with China, and which Greek and Roman works did they use most commonly in their attempts?

To the likes of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, classics was the master-knowledge. Graeco-Roman antiquity offered paradigms of what art and culture should (supposedly) be, historical precedents for diplomatic encounters, narratives which could be used as frameworks to explore important themes, and a set of familiar touchstones which might introduce unfamiliar ideas by analogy. At times, writers used classics to negotiate Chinese topics that were simultaneously international news and personally significant. For example, both Sara Coleridge and Tennyson invoked Homer and Lucretius in considerations of the opium crisis which were intensified by their families’ experiences of addiction: reimagining those problems in classical universes appears to allow the authors perspective.

At the height of Victorian imperialism, Virgil’s Aeneid was the dominant classical presence in Anglophone writing on China, largely because Britain became obsessed with empire and the perceived Roman inheritance. But earlier literature on Chinese themes drew from a wider range of ancient works. In Lamia – a poem with peculiar Chinese connections – Keats’s interest in Apollonius of Tyana ensued attention to early church history in Gibbon and others. Charles Lamb’s reinvention of Porphyry’s tale as Chinese in ‘Roast Pig’ followed citations of that philosopher in debates on vegetarianism. Such textual range reflects the diversification of classics during the Romantic period, although I suggest too that offbeat or eccentric classical figures corresponded with Keats’s and Lamb’s feelings of marginality in relation to the elitism of classical studies.

3) Did the extent to which Anglophone writers relied on classical lenses to interpret China diminish over the course of the period you examine, or were the interactions you perceive more complex?

Broadly, as Sinology advanced, classics was used in more sophisticated considerations of Chinese culture rather than disappearing from the discussion. Tennyson’s ‘The Ancient Sage’ (1885), one of the later texts studied in the book, is a response to Laozi’s Dao De Jing, which Tennyson read in translation. Framed as a Socratic dialogue, the poem attempts to encapsulate the ideal Daoist life in a set of quasi-Semitic commandments, and wonders whether the sage’s professed knowledge of a universal substance amounts to an Augustinian experience of faith. It’s a long way from the eighteenth-century accounts of Chinese culture which say tersely that ancestral tablets are the same as Roman household-gods.

But classical presences persisted in Anglophone treatments of China for other reasons too. For instance, a narrative arose about the Willow pattern which was reiterated in poems and musicals. These claimed that the Willow narrative was an ancient Chinese tale. The source for this story of transformation is actually Metamorphoses – but Ovid was neglected for much of the nineteenth century, which I suspect is one reason why the origin of the Willow narrative went unnoticed.

4) Was the use of classical works to frame China inevitably occlusive, or did classical mediations sometimes provide a framework for genuine cultural interchange?

It could prove occlusive at times. If you read John Barrow’s account of China you’ll find that he dismisses Daoism by repeating Jean-Baptiste Du Halde’s claim that it’s mere Epicureanism. From such neat associations you can see why Anglophone scholars were dissuaded from taking Chinese spirituality seriously until the Baptist translators who followed some decades later. Yet rich dialogues were possible too. The Chinese diplomat Zeng Jize authored a famous English-language essay about the destruction of the Summer Palace at the hands of Anglo-French soldiers in 1860. As a figure for China’s political weakness he mentions the fallen Saturn, which I suggest is taken from Keats. Although the image was probably supplied by Zeng’s assistant with the essay, Samuel Halliday Macartney – who was related to the early ambassador – it’s evidence that Graeco-Roman antiquity came to be seen as a means to mediate Sino-British relations from the Chinese side too. Accordingly, modern debate about the possible repatriation of treasures taken from the Summer Palace is interrelated with that on the Parthenon Sculptures.

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

I’m looking more specifically at Anglophone receptions of Daoism. This develops my contribution to a special issue of The Wordsworth Circle on Romantic Asia, and involves not only translations of Chinese texts, but Western encounters with inner alchemy and the Daoist quest for immortality. With Willa Murphy I’m editing a volume on Religion for the Cambridge University Press series Cambridge Themes in Irish Literature and Culture. I’m involved in CNSCI, a research consortium that unites Monash, Durham, McGill, Aarhus, and other institutions, and am exploring ways to collaborate on my projects internationally and perhaps to establish new research networks.