Strange truths in undiscovered lands, Shelley's poetic development and romantic geography

grantor: University of TorontoDuring the Romantic period, when a constant stream of distant people entering into the home ground forced Britain to revise its cognitive map of the world, geographically constructed Others became extremely important in the (re)constitution of the British identity, and Romantic writers were drawn into a new kind of poetic space where they engaged geographical and cultural otherness on a scale that was different from the past. This dissertation traces Shelley's development of what I call a "Romantic geography," an alternative space whose geopolitics are created by the poetic imagination, backed by insight into the contemporary world. I consider the Shelley canon as a developing quest for "strange truths in undiscovered lands" and for an ideal place ("Alastor" 77). Encounters and interactions between the Self and Others lead to reflections on the new relationship between the two, discoveries of multiple truths in unfamiliar forms, and possibilities of visionary improvements of places. Shelley's poems create an alternative space, revaluing hitherto neglected categories--women, non-Europeans, dreams, marginality and hybridity--transforming a landscape devastated by Western expansion, and moving towards a fluid cosmic vision that revitalizes the margin by the union of European and non-European cultures and the resulting hybridization. The Introduction provides historical and theoretical background. The five chapters that follow examine specific geographical regions in his poems, showing how the figure of the imagination called the "epipsyche"--the soul within a soul--is geographically structured as the female Other in a marginalized space. Chapter 1 investigates the dynamic relationship between the centre and the zones of otherness in 'Queen Mab'. Chapter 2 looks at the germ of hybridity in the figure of the Eastern Other in "Alastor." In Chapter 3, Shelley encounters an absolute Other in Mont Blanc. Chapter 4 considers cooperations and interactions between the East and the West in ' Prometheus Unbound'. Chapter 5 concludes the dissertation by tracing the African expedition and hybridizing activities of a female cross between Apollo and an African nymph in "The Witch of Atlas."Ph.D