Percy Bysshe Shelley was an accomplished rhetorician as well as a major poet and prose writer, and his works in all genres are characterized by his deliberate manipulation of the relationship between author and reader. He employs a remarkable array of rhetorical and thematic devices in service to the sort of humanitarian reform that was always one of his principal objectives. Shelley was, in fact, one of the first modern writers to take such deliberate care to select, to envision, and in many instances to create readers and to assign to them particular roles in the realization of his works.

The book examines a broad range of Shelley's writing, including not just the poetry but also less frequently examined works like Shelley's prefaces to his works, his published and unpublished essays, his early prose romances, and his private letters. What emerges is a picture of an idealistic and ambitious young author who took great pains to cast himself in the role of radical humanitarian reformer.

There is a striking consistency in Shelley's writings in terms of his characteristic themes: the rejection and repudiation of revenge as a motive for human activity, the salutary experience of love and community, and the exercise of charity and self-sacrifice in a code of poetic ethics that reveals Shelley's view of himself as prophet and patriot. Not some mere idealistic dreamer , Shelley was in fact surprisingly pragmatic and well informed when it came to matters of political philosophy and rhetorical strategy, so that a study of his work in the contexts of the diverse and sometimes non-overlapping audiences to which he directed it reveals a dazzling variety of ways of addressing those audiences

Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989

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