Duffy, Edward (Thomas) 1942-

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DUFFY, Edward (Thomas) 1942-

PERSONAL:

Born March 30, 1942, in New York, NY; married, January 21, 1967; wife's name Mary; divorced; married Barbara St. John (a business manager); May 27, 1978; children: (first marriage) Deirdre, Joshua, Benjamin. Education: Manhattan College, B.A., 1963; Columbia University, M.A., 1965, Ph.D., 1971.

ADDRESSES:

Home—2640 North 71, Wauwatosa, WI 53213. Office—Department of English, Marquette University, P.O. Box 1881, Milwaukee, WI 53201-1881. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

University of California at Santa Barbara, assistant professor of English literature, 1971-79; Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, assistant professor, 1981-86, associate professor of English, 1986—.

MEMBER:

Modern Language Association, Keats-Shelley Association.

WRITINGS:

Rousseau in England: The Context for Shelley's Critique of the Enlightenment, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1979.

Contributor to journals, including English Language Notes and Studies in Romanticism.

SIDELIGHTS:

Edward Duffy's book, Rousseau in England: The Context for Shelley's Critique of the Enlightenment, explores the work of eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau along with that of British Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Duffy's purpose, however, is not to merely summarize both writers' works, but to demonstrate how the general reception of Rousseau's thoughts in England and Shelley's feelings about Rousseau in particular influenced the imagery in The Triumph of Life, one of Shelley's commentaries on the great Frenchman's concepts.

The Triumph of Life is a long poem on which Shelley was working in 1822 when he drowned during a storm off the coast of Italy. Although the poet's death left the piece uncompleted, according to a reviewer in Choice, Duffy "concludes that the poem is not only one of the most powerful texts of English Romanticism but a historical document of surpassing interest as well." Duffy focuses on Shelley's use of light and dark images to manifest his concerns of that historical period during the eighteenth century known as the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. "Duffy is right to draw our attention to the complex patterns of imagery [in the poem]," noted Timothy Webb in the Times Literary Supplement, "related to light and darkness and to indicate Shelley's preference for the intuited, the unseen and the elusive."