Rousseau in England

Rousseau in England: The Context for Shelley’s Critique of the Enlightenment by Edward Duffy examines how Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s reputation was forged, mythologized, and transformed in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, culminating in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s radical reinterpretation of Rousseau in *The Triumph of Life*. Whereas Napoleon dominated European political mythology for most of Shelley’s contemporaries, Duffy shows how Rousseau emerged in England as a cultural symbol—cast by Edmund Burke and others as the epitome of Enlightenment folly and blamed for the Revolution’s disasters. Against this background, Shelley recast Rousseau as a complex, ambivalent figure who embodied both the failures and the unrealized promise of Europe’s revolutionary upheavals. The book’s first chapters reconstruct the English critical and political traditions that shaped Rousseau’s image, tracing the way reviewers, polemicists, and public intellectuals translated his works and life into a set of cultural givens. These representations provided the “grammar” within which Romantic poets engaged Rousseau. Duffy then turns to Coleridge, Hazlitt, and others before focusing on Shelley’s *The Triumph of Life* as a climactic act of myth-making that revises inherited assumptions. By situating Shelley’s poem within the dense ideological and historical discourse surrounding Rousseau, Duffy reveals how Shelley sought not simply to echo Romantic subjectivity but to rearticulate the meaning of revolution itself. Both a study of cultural reception and a close reading of Romantic poetics, Rousseau in England illuminates how myths of the Enlightenment were constructed, contested, and redeployed in the making of English Romanticism. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.