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Illegitimate Shelley: Radical Piracy and the Textual Edition as Cultural Performance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Neil Fraistat
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Abstract

A textual edition can be read as a cultural performance if one considers its interlaced linguistic and bibliographical codes as monumentalizing rhetoric, opening the textual space of the edition into the social space of its production, distribution, and reception. Mary Shelley's 1824 edition of Percy Bysshe Shelley's Posthumous Poems and the pirated volume published by the radical William Benbow in 1826 each produce what might be called a “rhetoric of Shelley,” a product of—and participant in — a larger set of social discourses and mechanisms of cultural reproduction. Whereas Mary Shelley's edition was successful, however, Benbow's “illegitimate” edition was not. Derwent Coleridge's discussion of Benbow's piracy reveals how the failure to appropriate Shelley for radical discourse could be claimed not merely as a justification of the “purity” of Shelley's poetry but also as what Pierre Bourdieu calls a “sociodicy,” the justification of an entire social hierarchy. (NF)

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 109 , Issue 3 , May 1994 , pp. 409 - 423
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1994

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