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The simultaneous appearance of three excellent new books about Shelley's writings not only enriches current Shelley studies: it also affords a view of the collective project of scholarship, in which new books are episodes in that large monograph that all Romanticists, like collaborators, have built up since the beginning of English departments. Whether or not the considerable overlap amongst the central concepts in these three new books manifests a Zeitgeist, their common critical and meta-critical themes afford us a helpful example of the extent to which, like literary works, scriptures of interpretation also occur in a context of historical change, as Ernst Troeltsch argued in 1922. (1)

Benjamin Colbert's introduction to Shelley's Eye points out that "in travel writing,... the 'eye' represents some form of motivated perception, in which aesthetic, moral, or political judgments are brought to bear on the observation of buildings, scenery, people, or complex tableaux" (7). Throughout Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime, Cian Duffy points out how, in the discourse of the "sublime," aesthetic, moral, and political judgements are brought to bear on natural landscape and the topic of social change. In Shelley and Vitality, Sharon Ruston points out how, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science and medicine, aesthetic, moral, and political judgments are brought to bear on the theory of life. I will be illustrating these books' particular arguments in order to clarify their considerable value for Shelley studies, as well as the specificity of these scholars' research and the commendable grace of their writing, but before descending to those particulars it may be helpful to notice how remarkable that three-item list of themes--aesthetic, moral, and political judgments, in that order--really is.

Heuristically, I will suggest a three-stage sequence in the last generation of Shelley studies, considering "generation" (conventionally) to mean roughly thirty-five years. Just that long ago, Earl Wasserman began his influential book Shelley: A Critical Reading by quoting several of Shelley's writings of 1811 and concluding that Shelley

has rational confidence in a Spirit of Nature that, operating in the same manner on nature and man, can impel them interminably toward perfection; on the other, he aspires to a perfect eternal afterlife, sanctioned not by divine revelation and a transcendent deity but only by his feeling and wishes. (2)

In 1975, Stuart Curran concludes in his important book Shelley's Annus Mirabilis (which is dedicated to the memory of Wasserman and which cites Wasserman's book nine times) that "skepticism, as Shelley represents it, is true faith, based upon the firm conviction that, since the mind structures reality, the mind can create paradise, as it has created hell, upon the plastic forms of the natural world." (3) Readers of this journal will be readily able to recall...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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