Freedom from the Stranglehold of Time: Shelley’s Visionary Conception in Queen Mab
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Authors
Weinberg, Alan M.
Issue Date
2016
Type
Article
Language
en
Keywords
Percy Bysshe Shelley , Queen Mab , time , vision , necessity , freedom
Alternative Title
Abstract
Notwithstanding ground-breaking studies of
Queen Mab, the visionary scope of the work
remains largely neglected. The present essay
sets out to explore the vision and to show how
the concern with Time is integral to it, and not
just a framing device for Mab’s overview of
past, present and future that forms the greater
substance of the whole work. The poem
envisions the possibility of overcoming time’s
dominion or at least of coming to terms with it.
The reach of the poem encompasses and
extends beyond history, the repository of
memory and recorded time, thus placing the
attack on society within a visionary
conceptualization that has no clear boundaries
at all, and necessarily so. Shelley’s intent is to
open up discourse, to saturate his work with
thinking that, from the broadest possible
imaginary perspective and given his own
personal stamp, disrupts time-bound
presuppositions that confine human lives
within the narrow limits that imprison
them.
Description
Citation
Weinberg, Alan 2016. Freedom from the Stranglehold of Time: Shelley’s Visionary Conception in Queen Mab, Romanticism 22.1: 90–106
Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
License
Journal
Volume
Issue
PubMed ID
DOI
ISSN
1354-991x