Book contents
- Percy Shelley in Context
- Percy Shelley in Context
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Part I Life and Death
- Part II Intellectual, Cultural, and Political Contexts
- Chapter 7 Ancient Philosophy
- Chapter 8 Ancient Poetry
- Chapter 9 English Literature to 1792
- Chapter 10 European Literature, Dante to Rousseau
- Chapter 11 The Visual and Plastic Arts
- Chapter 12 The Radical Press
- Chapter 13 Shelley and the Lake Poets
- Chapter 14 Mary Shelley
- Chapter 15 Thomas Love Peacock
- Chapter 16 Byron and Shelley
- Chapter 17 Keats and Shelley
- Chapter 18 Revolution and Reform
- Chapter 19 Political Economy
- Chapter 20 Empire
- Chapter 21 Shelley’s Sexless Sexuality
- Chapter 22 The British Empiricists
- Chapter 23 The Sciences
- Chapter 24 Religion
- Part III Writings
- Part IV Afterlives
- Further Reading
- Index
Chapter 21 - Shelley’s Sexless Sexuality
from Part II - Intellectual, Cultural, and Political Contexts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 April 2025
- Percy Shelley in Context
- Percy Shelley in Context
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Part I Life and Death
- Part II Intellectual, Cultural, and Political Contexts
- Chapter 7 Ancient Philosophy
- Chapter 8 Ancient Poetry
- Chapter 9 English Literature to 1792
- Chapter 10 European Literature, Dante to Rousseau
- Chapter 11 The Visual and Plastic Arts
- Chapter 12 The Radical Press
- Chapter 13 Shelley and the Lake Poets
- Chapter 14 Mary Shelley
- Chapter 15 Thomas Love Peacock
- Chapter 16 Byron and Shelley
- Chapter 17 Keats and Shelley
- Chapter 18 Revolution and Reform
- Chapter 19 Political Economy
- Chapter 20 Empire
- Chapter 21 Shelley’s Sexless Sexuality
- Chapter 22 The British Empiricists
- Chapter 23 The Sciences
- Chapter 24 Religion
- Part III Writings
- Part IV Afterlives
- Further Reading
- Index
Summary
A poet celebrated for his syncretism, Shelley’s sense of fluidity arguably extends to his understanding of sex and sexuality, as he wrote during a time of peak flexibility and transition in thinking about gender-sex. Reading Erasmus Darwin’s descriptions of variously sexed plants, Ovid’s tales of shapeshifting, and William Lawrence’s intertwinement of sexed and racialised bodies, Shelley, the great poet of relation, comes to see the body as materially shifting, porous, and relational. Reading passages from A Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love alongside the figure of nonbinary, intersex creation in ‘The Witch of Atlas’, Asia’s transformation into the posthuman ‘lamp of light’, and the nonhuman ‘shape all light’ in ‘The Triumph of Life’, this essay suggests Shelley began to understand polymorphous sexuality connected to sexed bodies of shapeshifting, mutable morphology.
Keywords
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Percy Shelley in Context , pp. 158 - 164Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025