University of Nottingham

Graduate Student, English

Postgraduate Teaching Fellow, PhD Student

Thesis Title: Romantic Blasphemies: Sacrilege and Creativity in the Literature of Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley

About

My research is concerned with appropriations of and negotiation with the issue of blasphemy in the literature of Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. My approach began as largely a socio-historical one, in which I attempted to establish the literature of Byron and Shelley within the context of the religious politics of the ‘Long Eighteenth Century’ as well as to the more specific concerns of the ‘Romantic’ period itself.

More recently, however, I have widened my approach and have begun to consider what I refer to as the ‘theory of blasphemy,’ particularly semantic concerns surrounding the term. To this end, I hope to combine these two approaches into investigating the potential relationship between blasphemy and eighteenth century theories of language. The dichotomy of ‘classical’ and ‘vulgar’ language that so pre-occupied the period has fired my interest in the history of print, particularly the divisions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ print culture and issues of copyright and piracy. I intend to explore blasphemy’s role in such a print culture and investigate Byron’s and Shelley’s relationship to the so-called ‘vulgar’ press.

A particular concern of my research is to both explore and unpick the conflation between the religious and the political in the period, such as the relationship between terms such as ‘sedition’ and ‘blasphemy’ amongst others. I hope to understand why a religious ‘radical’ was necessarily considered a political radical and vice versa.

Although blasphemy de facto can often be regarded as crime more of politics than of religion throughout history, my argument is that the manifestation of religious terminology within the political discourse of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is of particular interest. Whereas in previous eras a blasphemous crime was deemed to be a political threat, this inter-relationship can be seen to occur in reverse in the Romantic era, where a political radical such as William Hone faced three ultimately unsuccessful trials for blasphemous libel in 1817. The suggestion is that in the politically volatile age of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, blasphemy became a convenient tool with which to label and discredit political opponents. My research investigates the literature of Byron and Shelley in relation to this politicking and particularly how their writing works to uncover and discredit such practices.

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