What are you reading?: Bysshe Inigo Coffey
Welcome to a new series of posts on the K-SAA Blog entitled ‘What are you reading?’
We want to use this space to support and encourage discussions relating to the latest Romantic-period scholarship, especially those publications (online and in print) concerned with the second generation of Romantic writers: Keats, the Shelleys, Byron, and their circles. Initially we will be asking Romanticism scholars about new and recent work that they might have encountered that will be of interest to our followers, and then we’ll give them the chance to comment on some of their favorite studies in general. We also want to know about what they might be reading more broadly - contemporary poetry, perhaps, or a new novel.
Our first interviewee is Bysshe Inigo Coffey. Bysshe is a teaching associate at the University of Exeter and his current project is a collaboration, with Anna Mercer and Nora Crook, to edit the Shelley notebook Library of Congress MSS. 13, 290, MSS. He is finishing his first monograph, Shelley’s Fractured Materiality and the Broken World. He reviews for both the Year’s Work in English Studies and Romantic Circles.
What new studies of Romantic literature are you reading right now?
I’m reading and reviewing for Romantic Circles Richard C. Sha’s Imagination and Science in Romanticism (Johns Hopkins, 2018).
Does this writing inform your current research and/or teaching?
Yes, my research concerns the ways in which prosody engages withdisparate scientific contexts, and Sha’s book explores illuminatingly the roleof the imagination in literary and scientific discovery. One of my principalaims is to extend the contexts in which we situate Shelley’s poetry. This hasbeen the aim of each of my recent articles for The WordsworthCircle and is the focus of my monograph.
What’s the critical book that figured most significantly in your PhDthesis/first monograph/most recent monograph?
I suppose it would have to be the late Michael O’Neill’s stunning Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem (Oxford, 1996). I have always been fascinated by the ways in which great poetry interrogates itself, questions its own motives, whilst building to its own staggering artifice. Think of Shelley’s Epipsychidion (1821) - a work that accomplishes so much and is so often discussed in terms of its failings. The title alone is a masterpiece of impacted artistry. No one writes about such instances as clearly and elegantly as O’Neill. My upcoming monograph, Shelley’s Fractured Materiality and the Broken World, does not engage consistently with his book as it is about Shelley’s remarkable conception of broken materiality, but O’Neill has nonetheless determined in many ways the list of my mind and my writing, and I’m very grateful.
What books are in your 'to read next' pile right now?(poetry, fiction, theory, anything!)
I’m going to work through Saintsbury’s History ofCriticism, his History of Prosody, and Browning’stranslation of the Agamemnon. Browning’s radical pauses are pureShelley. I am revisiting Bellow’s novels too. I read Ravelstein atleast once a year. I like the landscape.
What books are on your night table or desk?
The bedside table always hosts a rather strange picnic. Right now, thereis Leo Strauss’s On Tyranny, his On Plato’sSymposium (one of the best commentaries on the thinker), FrancisO’Gorman’s edition of Swinburne for Oxford Authors, Maurice Cranston’sbiography of Rousseau, and Rousseau’s own Julie, ou lanouvelle Héloïse. I’m also dipping in and out of Patrick Rance’s TheGreat British Cheese Book. That is, in so many ways, the mostchallenging of them all.
My desk is more sedate. I have the Johns Hopkins and Longman Shelley eds. to date. I have PBS’ letters, Bieri’s bio, The Unextinguished Hearth, Journals, my Liddell and Scott, Riddle’s Latin and English Dictionary, Murray’s Grammar, Walker’s Rhetorical Grammar, Aeschylus and Athens, and vol. 1 of Shelley’s Prose (Murray).
Which book do you most frequently recommend to your students?Which students? Why?
I try to return my students to the past as I think we’re slightly tooconcerned with the present and the contemporary, which takes care of itself.Innovation is always celebrated, but it is, largely, a junk word. After all,the introduction of something new isn’t necessarily good. I could devise a newway of eating an egg that is wholly impractical and disgusting, but so long asit hadn’t been done before it would still warrant the adjective innovative. TheKindle is innovative but assuredly horrible. The genius of our times is theassociation of the innovative with the good. In reaction to this presentism, Ilike, puckishly, to recommend such things as Salt’s A Shelley Primer,Locock’s notes to The Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (they’rewonderful), Todhunter’s study of Shelley, and so on because there is a lot wehave missed. I like to insist that my students have a critical work in theirbibliography which was published before 1960. But my favourite recommendationat the moment is Shelley’s translation of the Symposium. In justtracing its reception history, there are great lessons to be learned.
Have there been any mainstream articles or publications on theRomantics you’d like to draw our attention to?
Richard Sha’s new book. It’s rather wonderful.