Introduction

i Shelley’s Shames

ii Shame Theories

iii Reticence

iv Affect and Romanticism

v Texts

Chapter One: Reticent Impersonations: Shelley’s Unhappy Consciousness

i The Empty Subject

ii Bad Faith

iii Shame and Ideology

iv Historicism

v The Problems of Materialism

Chapter Two: Alastor’s Mute Poets

i Shelley and Wordsworth

ii Rejecting ‘natural piety’

iii The veiled maid and the disgrace of the alternative

iv The narrator as victim of his own constructions

Chapter Three: Shame, Silence and Historicism in The Cenci

i Beatrice’s Casuistry

ii Shame and De-humanisation

iii Shame as Self-construction

Chapter Four: Julian and Maddalo: What the ‘cold world shall not know’

i The Reticence of ‘the cold world’ and Shelley’s Critique of Symbols

ii The Maniac’s Resistance and Byron’s ‘Prometheus’

iii The Maniac’s Performance of Shame

iv Julian’s Reserve

Chapter Five: Metaphysical Sympathies

i Sympathetic Poetics in A Defence of Poetry

ii Transcending the Ego in Ode to the West Wind, Mont Blanc, Ode to Intellectual Beauty and Adonais

Chapter Six: The Jane Poems: Love, Lyric and Life

i Eroticism and the hollowness of the "Lyric I"

ii Sensory Bad faith

iii Beyond Denial

Chapter Seven: The Triumph of Life: Pleasure versus process and the shame of self-knowledge

i The Failure of Allegory

ii Rousseau as the Subject-in-Shame

iii Countering the ‘cold glare’

Conclusion