Alice Robinson
Doctoral Student in Literature - Alice’s thesis is entitled ‘'The Vigorous Awakening Spring in That Divinest Climate': Ancient Rome in Percy Shelley's Writing’.
Research project title
'The Vigorous Awakening Spring in That Divinest Climate': Ancient Rome in Percy Shelley's Writing
Supervisors
Prof Michael Rossington, Dr Claire Stocks and Dr Anke Walter
Contact details
Email: a.robinson6@ncl.ac.uk
Research interests
- intertextuality
- classical reception
- Latin language
- The Long Eighteenth Century
- eco-criticism
A brief outline of my research project
My research investigates how Latin literature inspires Percy Shelley’s writing, particularly how ancient Roman authors inform his philosophical and radical outlook on human society. In 1813, Percy Shelley published Queen Mab, a controversial poem about humankind’s wrongdoings throughout history and in the author’s present day. Queen Mab contains resonations of Lucretius, Pliny, and Horace, who aid Shelley’s construction of an innovative timeline in which a utopian future has undone all of humanity’s acts of transgression since the dawn of civilisation.
My first chapter offers an original, in-depth analysis of this important intertext. My second and third chapters move forwards in time, to Italy, where Shelley wrote, among other works, Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci. In my current chapter on the former text, I am researching the influence of Lucan, poet of the Bellum Civile, analysing how this 65 CE anti-epic informs Shelley’s conceptualisation of generational cycles and tyrannical leadership. My fourth chapter then analyses Latin influences in The Triumph of Life, composed in 1822.
I hope that my research will throw new light on previously unchartered intertextual moments between Shelley and his ancient Roman sources, and provide new avenues for researching the reception of Latin texts in the Romantic period more widely.
Conferences and forum presentations
- October 2020: “Mapping Ancient Rome in Percy Shelley’s Writing”, The Middle Modern Group, Newcastle University
- November 2020: “’Her Unbound Hair’: Gendered Emotion in Shelley’s The Cenci and Seneca and Ovid’s Medea”, ‘Agency and Emotion’, Durham University
- December 2020: “Mapping Ancient Rome in Percy Shelley’s Writing”, SHCA Postgraduate Research Forum, Newcastle University
Research groups
- October 2020: “Mapping Ancient Rome in Percy Shelley’s Writing”, The Middle Modern Group, Newcastle University
- November 2020: “’Her Unbound Hair’: Gendered Emotion in Shelley’s The Cenci and Seneca and Ovid’s Medea”, ‘Agency and Emotion’, Durham University
- December 2020: “Mapping Ancient Rome in Percy Shelley’s Writing”, SHCA Postgraduate Research Forum, Newcastle University