ABSTRACT
Scholars have occasionally regarded Percy Bysshe Shelley’s very considerable prose oeuvre in analogous fashion, its intellectual brilliance notwithstanding. While prose works like ‘A Defence of Poetry’ are undisputed masterpieces, critical response to Shelley’s narrative prose fiction in particular has always been mixed. Overshadowed by the great poetry that followed his early Gothic romances, Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, his early attempts at fiction and the fragmentary prose narratives he wrote during the rest of his life hover at the margins of the Shelley canon. The extant fragments of prose fiction reveal the skill with which Shelley constructed and manipulated complex verbal textures in prose no less than in verse. Jerrold Hogle responded to critical sniping about Shelley’s nearly indistinguishable characters, ‘repetitious’ and obsessive prose, ‘nonsensical’ plotting and a virtual absence of ‘linear cohesion’ in his prose fiction by proposing that Shelley was in fact exploring an alternative notion of narrative.
