SOURCE: “Macropolitics of Utopia: Shelley's Hellas in Context,” in Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism, edited by Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991, pp. 86-101.

In the following essay, Kipperman studies the utopian, romantic, and radical view of history offered in Percy Shelley's Hellas.

“We are all Greeks,” said Shelley in his Preface to Hellas, “Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece. … The modern Greek is the descendant of those glorious beings whom the imagination almost refuses to figure to itself as belonging to our Kind, and he inherits much of their sensibility, their rapidity of conception, their enthusiasm, and their courage.” Shelley's idealism here echoes the excited report of the Greek revolution by Leigh Hunt in the Examiner. But, as historian William St. Clair records in his withering and often sad critique of philhellenism, That Greece Might...