This chapter addresses the relationship between Shelley’s epic theory and practice with reference notably to Laon and Cythna and “A Defence of Poetry”, as well as Queen Mab and Prometheus Unbound. The essay shows how Laon and Cythna breaks with epic tradition – and exceeds Shelley’s own theoretical account of the genre – in finding creative solutions to the problem of how to link past, present, and future, as well as the local and the universal, without didacticism or what Shelley in the ‘Defence’ calls the ‘gross’ sense of prophecy: a foretelling of the future. I contend that Shelley’s epic poetry does not seek to recuperate past moments of social coherence to guide and unify the present or predict the future so much as to leave space for not knowing what will come. Shelley’s experimental epics regard a hopeful uncertainty as, paradoxically, the only certain means of reform.

This chapter looks at early interactions between parent and infant, from joint looking at faces, gaze following, and attention to hands and gestures, to later interactions where infants and adults readily capture each other’s attention. It examines the ways adults modify their speech to infants and young children, e.g., with short, grammatical utterances, formulaic routines, repetitions in variation sets, higher pitch, slower rate, and pausing at the ends of utterances. Adults adjust their speech to what their children understand and provide feedback on children’s errors, checking up to make sure they have understood them and so offering them a conventional way to say what they appear to intend. Adults establish joint attention and engage with infant and child activities, anchoring their conversational contributions to what is physically present and visible, and talking about the child’s current activities. And infants become adept at attracting adult attention and enlisting their help in different activities. In child-directed speech, adults focus on what is physically and conversationally present, and respond to the topics children introduce. They choose short, high-frequency words, with high neighborhood density, many with concrete referents present in the here and now. Conversational interactions provide the setting for acquisition.

Focusing on silence as means of expression, we first weed out other phenomena termed ‘silence’, some of which have nothing to do with language, while others form part of interaction but are not a means of expression. The primary measure serving this distinction is whether the referent so denoted is situated within interaction or external to it. Stillness, being external to interaction, includes numerous states external to the human body, such as the stillness of nature. The chapter includes an examination of silences referring to absence of speech and so falling in the realm of interaction in terms of their place and role within interaction, the matter of choice and the nature of the silence exposes diverse sorts of silences. Somatic and mental symptoms such as muteness are such that silence being its signifier is not the product of the speaker’s choice and does not serve interaction. Paralinguistic pauses constitute the temporal suspension of speech. Some such pauses serve interaction and some not. Moving to the content plane, the unsaid and empty speech are silences in terms of context, chosen by the speaker to conceal rather than communicate. Unlike the above, silencing is silence externally imposed on the potential speaker.