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Shelleys’ business and what was the world’s business is thus destabilized by a novel which fictionalizes historical accounts, appropriates the past as the present, projects a critique of Italian political affairs onto an English scenario (in the process subverting the fashionable form of Gothic romance), and enrols the author’s friends and neighbours in its cast list. In the end, readers cannot be sure if
government that he understood as speedily bringing about ‘a return to absolutism’. 45 In the well-rehearsed arguments about the connection between Walpole's immersion in this tense political affair and Otranto , the author is said to channel his discontent with the tyrannical authority of George III and his Tory supporters into an allegory about an equally despotic ruler – Prince Manfred – and his replacement by the legitimate heir to Otranto – Theodore. With the latter representing a wrongfully usurped ‘ancient political order