A Brighter Morn: The Shelley Circle's Utopian Project

Percy Bysshe Shelley's utopian vision was largely a product of the tumultuous final quarter of the eighteenth century, when the American, French, and industrial revolutions profoundly changed the way in which social, political, and economic relationships were viewed. In A Brighter Morn, noted Shelley scholars identify the qualities of this unique brand of utopianism, which was a complex and frequently conflicted blend of the personal, poetical, and political realms. This collection of essays sorts through these perplexities and discords, exploring Shelleyan utopianism in a variety of contexts— place and placelessness, time and timelessness, publicity and privacy, and physicality and spirituality— and concluding with a snapshot of the Western psyche at a crucial point in its development.

Darby Lewes is Professor of English at Lycoming College. She is the author of Nudes from Nowhere: Utopian Sexual Landscapes (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) and Dream Revisionaries: Genre and Gender in Women's Utopian Fiction, 1870–1920 (University of Alabama Press, 1995).