The Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literature and Cultures Workshop is pleased to welcome

Nate Crocker

PhD candidate, English Language and Literature, University of Chicago

Hearing Shelley’s “printless air”: Milton, Music, and the Psychoacoustics of Print in Prometheus Unbound

Tuesday, November 18, 2025, 11 am – 12:20 pm CST

Wieboldt 103 and on Zoom

with a response from

Edgar Garcia, Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Chicago

In this chapter, I consider two deeply related senses of the word “air” in the Romantic period—one, as a musical form, and the other, as gaseous atmospheric substance—through a close study of the musical atmospheres of Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound … with Other Poems. Shelley’s sense of air, my chapter argues, draws heavily on Milton’s in Paradise Lost, particularly in its use of the atmosphere as an aural medium for measuring the (dis)harmony of a larger political state. Through a close reading of Shelley’s Miltonic musical airs, as well as the reading practices that he imagines them giving voice to, I outline an elemental media poetics for interpreting Shelley’s collection as a whole, and arguably all early nineteenth-century printed verse—a theory of reading that floats between the readers’ “cloud of mind” and the printed book they hold, through the highly political zone of readerly perception that I, following Shelley, refer to as “the printless air.”

Nate’s paper (to be read in advance) and the Zoom link can be found here. The password will be distributed to our listserv. To join, click here and go to “Subscribe.”