Romantic Reconfigurations of Gender: Ethical and Power Inversions between Femininity and Masculinity in Percy Shelley's "The Cenci" (original) (raw)
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Tortured Logic: Answering to No One in Shelley's "The Cenci"
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This article offers a reading of Percy Shelley's verse-drama, The Cenci, and Shelley's theory of dramatic poetry more broadly. In The Cenci, sexual violence is an instrument of juridical torture, draining narrative and testimony of therapeutic or legal value. The essay contends that Beatrice Cenci's refusal to answer questions about her incestuous assault or to call herself a "parricide" exposes the mechanisms that undergird her impossible situation. Yet her response to this violence is nonetheless generative: not inarticulate but disarticulated, Beatrice repurposes her sense of violation in embodied and poetic, rather than narrative and rhetorical, terms. She is, thus, in every sense, both a subject of torture and an exemplar of Shelley's "dramatic poet." Contextualizing his dramaturgy amid gendered and violent "spectacles" in Romantic-era theater, I show how Shelley's ideas anticipate twentieth-century writings on the interrelationship between violence and language.
" …to poison and corrupt her soul " : Shelley's Poetic Designs of Incest in The Cenci
FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts, 2017
This paper examines Percy Bysshe Shelley’s designs of the father-daughter incest in his tragedy The Cenci. It proposes that Shelley’s deviation from his historical source, concerning Count Cenci’s atrocities and Beatrice’s characterizations, insinuates the idea of incest as the embodiment of a dark poetics that features identity annihilation and assimilation.
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Understanding the Gender Complexities of Shakespeare
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