Percy Shelley did not believe that the society will become better through violent revolution, but only through nature’s evolutions and the increment of virtuousness among the world population, as he expressed through the poem Queen Mab (Wikipedia, 2019e). On the statue that was moved to London, Ozymandias challenged all the other people on the world to surpass his achievements (Wikipedia, 2019d). He also led campaigns in Nubia and Libya and was famous for leading military expeditions (Wikipedia, 2019f). Ozymandias, during his reign, defeated the Sherden sea pirates, led several campaigns in Syria, and conquered Tunip, where for 120 years no Egyptian soldiers have reached, erecting statues of him along the way. This is believed to have inspired Percy Shelley to compose the poem Ozymandias (Wikipedia, 2019c). Background of the poemīritish Museum announced its acquisition of a large piece of the statue of the pharaoh Ramesses II (who is called Ozymandias in Greek, and was described by the Greek historian as ‘king of kings’) in around 1817 (although it did not arrive in London until 1821, and Shelly did not have the opportunity to see it because he has moved to Italy by then) (Wikipedia, 2019d). Then we will look at the uncertainties of the speakers in the poem in the poststructuralist perspective, which expresses Shelley’s dissatisfaction of being only able to hear about the statue from the others. In this essay, we will first look at the background in which Ozymandias is set, and we will analyze the message of the story in the structuralist perspective through the details of the poet, and the history of the king Ozymandias. On the other hand, the poststructuralists look into paradoxes and uncertainties as they think that signs’ meanings depend on the perceiver, and different people would have different perceptions. They look into the conventions of the genre, the history or different forms of art (including other literature) that the literary work refers to. According to Barry (2017), the structuralists use scientific methods to analyze a literary work.
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