SOURCE: “Time's Tale: The Temporal Poetics of Shelley's Alastor,” in Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol. XLV, 1996, pp. 132-55.

In the following essay, Murphy discusses the sense of narrative time in Shelley's Alastor.

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While Shelley's reputation as a poet has often rested upon an estimate of his talents as a lyricist, critics of the last decade have complicated this judgment by increasingly focusing on the poet's engagement with that literary mode most conspicuously at odds with lyricism: narrative. In this latter group the work of Tilottama Rajan stands out as the most extensive and theoretically ambitious to date. Her recent essay, “The Web of Human Things: Narrative and Identity in Alastor,” continues her previous efforts to reverse the traditional valorization of lyric over narrative in Romantic studies.¹ Recapitulating the canonical reading of Alastor as an allegory of visionary failure, Rajan rescripts this loss as the deconstructive triumph of narrative. She...