Aumann, Neville (2005) Matrices and mavericks: a Kristevan analysis of the poetry of Shelley. Research Master thesis, Victoria University.

Abstract

Kristeva, in her work, Revolution in Poetic Language, analyses nineteenth-century avant-garde poetic texts as exemplars of the manifestation of the otherwise repressed semiotic chora. This thesis involves an analysis of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poetic texts in a similar critique. Shelley's poetry, though not as fully as that of avant-garde poets such as Stephane Mallarme, responds to a Kristevan reading. This reading involves the maternal as being both significant and transgressive. The Introduction opens the thesis with a discussion of the methodology that marks Kristeva's analysis of the poetic texts of Mallarme, which is used here as an exemplar for a reading of Shelley's texts. A survey of the last two centuries of Shelleyan criticism, together with a discussion of how this analysis differs from the critical legacy, is provided in the first chapter. The second chapter gives a fuller description of Kristeva's theory of the poetic text, which forms the basis for the analysis of Shelley's poetry in the succeeding chapters. These chapters form the body of the thesis, as Kristevan theory is applied to a reading of Shelley's poetic texts, in terms of the maternal. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the partial interpenetration of Shelley's poetic texts with Kristeva's theoretical texts, which act gives the title to this thesis: Matrices and Mavericks.

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