Coasting Classical Antiquity: Percy Shelley in the Bay of Naples
In: Navigating Cultural Spaces: Maritime PlacesSearch for other papers by Timothy Saunders in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Purchase instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
This essay offers a close reading of Percy Shelley's epistolary description of a boat trip he took around the Bay of Naples in December 1818. It explores in particular his enactment of what might be called a coastal aesthetics, in which Shelley's perception and evaluation of the classical remains that line the bay are shaped by and mediated through the specific topographical features of that bay. It argues that here the continuing aesthetic value of classical antiquity for Shelley does not lie in its ability to uphold any kind of diachronic continuity with its original forms in the past, but in its capacity to achieve synchronic coherence with its present environment. In this way, aesthetic value in Shelley's coastal aesthetics requires a simultaneous cognition and crossing of borders: between what lies above the waterline and what lies below it; between how things look from the land and how they look from the sea; between literature and landscape; culture and nature; past and present; and, perhaps above all, between all these things at once.