ABSTRACT This essay examines Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1810 work Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson. By returning to the political moment of the work’s composition and publication, I establish a new and formative context for the work (which is often considered juvenilia and consequently less closely read than it could be): the political turmoil surrounding petitions in 1810. As I demonstrate, the poem, from its choice of Nicholson as a subject to its thematic and formal gestures, dramatizes the political dead-end of the liberal faith in petitions and, ultimately, offers a radical critique of the ideology from which they derive and their consequent violence. Indeed, what emerges in the Posthumous Fragments is a typology of violence linking the structural violence of monarchy with forms of empirical violence such as war and suffering. And finally, to show the sustained relevance of this dynamic in Shelley’s political imagination, I conclude by briefly discussing the role of petitions in The Cenci.

中文翻译：

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雪莱玛格丽特·尼科尔森 (Margaret Nicholson) 死后片段中的政治、请愿和暴力

摘要 本文考察了珀西·比希·雪莱 (Percy Bysshe Shelley) 1810 年的作品玛格丽特·尼科尔森 (Margaret Nicholson) 的死后碎片。通过回到作品创作和出版的政治时刻，我为作品建立了一个新的、形成性的背景（这通常被认为是青少年，因此阅读程度不如预期）：1810 年围绕请愿书的政治动荡。表明，这首诗从选择尼科尔森作为主题，再到其主题和形式上的姿态，戏剧化了请愿中自由主义信仰的政治死胡同，并最终对他们所源自的意识形态及其结果进行了激进的批判暴力。事实上，《死后碎片》中出现的是一种暴力类型，将君主制的结构性暴力与战争和苦难等经验暴力形式联系起来。