The Other Mary Shelley Beyond Frankenstein

by Fisch, Audrey; Mellor, Anne K.; Schor, Esther H.

• ISBN13: 9780195077407
• ISBN10: 0195077407
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1993-07-08
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Although Frankenstein is now widely taught in classes on Romanticism, little attention has been paid to the considerable corpus of Mary Shelley's other works. Indeed the excitement of the last decade at feminist approaches to Frankenstein has ironically obscured the persona of its author. This collection of essays, written by a preeminent group of Romantic scholars, sketches a portrait of the "other Mary Shelley": the writer and intellectual who recognized the turbulent interplay among issues of family, gender, and society, and whose writings resonate strongly in the setting of contemporary politics, culture, and feminism. By analyzing a previously neglected body of novels, novellas, reviews, travel writing, essays, letters, biographies, and tales, and by emphasizing Mary Shelley's shrewd assessment of Romanticism, the essays in this volume offer a ground-breaking evaluation of one of the foremost cultural critics of the nineteenth century.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction	p. 3
Romanticism and Resistance	p. 15
Mary Shelley's Sympathy and Irony: The Editor and Her Corpus	p. 17
Notes	p. 35
Editorial Privilege: Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley's Audiences	p. 39
Notes	p. 62
Reading Mary Shelley's Journals: Romantic Subjectivity and Feminist Criticism	p. 73
Notes	p. 86
Mary Shelley and the Taming of the Byronic Hero: """"Transformation"""" and The Deformed Transformed	p. 89
Notes	p. 104
The Last Man: Apocalypse Without Millennium	p. 107
Notes	p. 121
Proserpine and Midas: Gender, Genre, and Mythic Revisionism in Mary Shelley's Dramas	p. 124
Notes	p. 136
Beatrice in Valperga: A New Cassandra	p. 140
Notes	p. 157
God's Sister: History and Ideology in Valperga	p. 159
Notes	p. 179
Culture and Criticism	p. 183
Swayed by Contraries: Mary Shelley and the Everyday	p. 185
Notes	p. 198
Disfiguring Economies: Mary Shelley's Short Stories	p. 204
Notes	p. 218
Subversive Surfaces: The Limits of Domestic Affection in Mary Shelley's Later Fiction	p. 220
Notes	p. 233
Mary Shelley in Transit	p. 235
Notes	p. 254
The Last Man	p. 258
Notes	p. 266
Plaguing Politics: AIDS, Deconstruction, and The Last Man	p. 267
Notes	p. 281
Contributors	p. 287
Index	p. 289
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