>LITTERARIA PRAGENSIA 2025 (35) 69
ABSTRACT (en)
This article argues that Shelley’s Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude dramatizes the fictional Poet’s physical decline and death as a psychosomatic response to philosophical overreaching, where the pursuit of Ideal beauty produces a state akin to inflammatory processes and a sustained condition of shock fatigue. I demonstrate how Shelley’s depiction of illness is shaped by contemporary medical theories, particularly John Brown’s Elements of Medicine (1780) and John Hunter’s A Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation, and Gun-shot Wounds (1794). These works inform Shelley’s portrayal of the Poet’s flushed but wasting body and his over-excited sensory system, offering a physiological substrate for the poem’s metaphysical and erotic tensions. Rather than signalling the Poet’s moral or spiritual failure, his decline expresses a complex convergence of somatic and Ideal desires. The “veiled maid” whom he attempts to pursue beyond the grave is both an erotic object and a Neo-Platonic figure of perfected self-knowledge. By aligning erotic longing with the naturally ambiguous semiotics of inflammatory response, subjectivity emerges as an ecologically entangled phenomenon, responsive to both the shocks of material nature and the lure of Ideal forms.
KEYWORDS (en)
Alastor, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Hunter, John Brown, inflammation, quest romance, erotic
DOI
https://doi.org/10.14712/2571452X.2025.69.9
SOURCES
Beddoes, Thomas. Hygeia: or Essays Moral and Medical: On the Causes Affecting the Personal State of Our Middling and Affluent Classes. Vol. 1. London: R. Phillips, 1802.
Brown, John. The Elements of Medicine. London: J. Johnson, 1795.
Crucefix, Martyn. “Wordsworth, Superstition, and Shelley’s Alastor.” Essays in Criticism 33, no. 2 (1983): 126-47.
Duff, David. Romanticism and the Uses of Genre. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Hamilton, Paul. Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Hogle, Jerrold E. Shelley’s Process: Radical Transference and the Development of His Major Works. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Hunter, John. A Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation, and Gun-shot Wounds. London: George Nicol, 1794.
Lacey, Andrew. Shelley’s Visions of Death. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.
Mitchell, Robert. “Regulating Life: Romanticism, Science, and the Liberal Imagination.” European Romantic Review 29, no. 3 (2018): 275-93.
Morton, Timothy. Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
O’Neill, Michael. “‘A kind of an excuse:’ Shelley and Wordsworth Revisited.” In Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900: Essays in Honour of Vincent Newey, edited by Ashley Chantler, Michael Davies, and Philip Shaw, 37-52. Farnham: Ashgate, 2001.
Plotinus. Concerning the Beautiful: Or, a Paraphrased Translation from the Greek of Plotinus, Ennead I, Book VI. Translated by Thomas Taylor (1787). London: John M. Watkins, 1917.
Plotinus. Translations from the Greek of the following Treatises of Plotinus: viz. On Suicide. Translated by Thomas Taylor. London: Printed for the Translator, 1834.
Ruston, Sharon. Shelley and Vitality. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Sha, Richard C. “Only Connect: Romantic Nerves, Pleasure, Aesthetics and Sexuality.” In Literature and Medicine: The Eighteenth Century, edited by Clark Lawlor and Andrew Mangham, 161-85. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Poems of Shelley. Vol. 1. Edited by Geoffrey Matthews and Kelvin Everest. Harlow: Longman, 1989.
The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by Mary Shelley. 4 vols. London: Edward Moxon, 1839.
Vickers, Neil. Coleridge and the Doctors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004.
Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads: 1798 and 1802. Edited by Fiona Stafford. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Wordsworth, William. Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800-1807. Edited by Jared Curtis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983.
